Embrace The Void: a Chronicle
by Maerlyn of Miria
Summary: In a world without civilization, a world without hope, a world whose rulers are determined to follow the dark, who can stop the world's long slow shuffle toward total destruction? A small group of beings begin a battle for the future, not only of that world, but of all worlds. Discordia approaches. The Tower trembles. Charyou Tree! Come, reap!


Author's note:

This story is based mostly on the MUD Hell moo, with a bit of Dark Tower thrown in for good measure. It's almost impossible to properly classify this story, as Hell Moo itself contains references to so many movies, books, short stories, etc.

For those of you who have never played the game, a quick description follows. Hell Moo is set at some point following 2170, nearly a century after a nuclear war has devastated the Earth. The main action of the game takes place in what remains of California and its neighboring locales. Thanks to the radiation and toxic chemicals left over from the war, which has become known as either "The Great Collapse", or "The Extinction event", some humans have mutated into other forms of life, zombies (at least some of them) possess full human intelligence, vampires roam the night, creatures known as Chuds (yes you read that correctly) live below the streets, beings known as abominations and hidious freaks dwell in a long dead city far from the player's starting point, and an all powerful corporation rules humanity with an iron fist. Reproduction via child birth is a thing of the past, as the corporation in question has set up mandatory clone banks to insure that humanity will be on earth to keep them in business forever. Although the game is primarily a "hack and slash", there are many opportunities for fan fictions. this story is the result of the work of a couple friends and myself over the last couple of years. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I've enjoyed working on it. This version has been heavily revised from its original form, so don't be surprised if you spot some alterations.

One additional note. i've left out certain aspects of gameplay, such as certain mutations, as I didn't wish to transform any of the characters into super beings. Also, the method of aquiring certain race mutations such as "Zombie' have been altered for artistic purposes. For those of you reading this who have played, or do play HellMoo, I apologise, but such things as zombies with the flight mutation belong in another type of story altogether, as do people deliberately going out and looking to aquire such a mutation. I may get around to writing some stories which more resemble actual gameplay at some point. But for now, here is Embrace the Void, a labor of love on my part, and one I hope you'll find interesting. As always, reviews are welcome.

the dream, in its multi-colored brilliance, was astounding. All characters which had no definition or depth, continued to jibber inanely while flipping through invisible papers, it seemed. Besides the colors floating there, not much of anything was happening except the jabbering of the beings in the dream. then an explosion happened, and Kristen Calvin sat bolt upright on the filthy straw mattress she was lying on in the Gein Foundation Orphanage. She woke up to see once again the dusty bookshelves and cracked, peeling and soot-covered walls and ceiling in the north dormitory. The room had once been carpeted, but what had once been a rug had worn away to a few threads covering a disintegrating mat covering the marble floor in most places. The windows up here hadn't been broken out like most of those in the downstairs areas of the orphanage had, but that was only because most people didn't bother trying to throw rocks that high up. A door in the dormitory's south wall led to what was referred to as a TV room, although there'd been no television in there for years. At least Kristen had never seen one in there. Another door led to a bathroom in which most of the appliances surprisingly still worked. The mattress in the bunk bed Kristen was assigned was losing its stuffing in several places and the structure of the bed itself was seriously damaged. other people would come in to repair the beds, but they would always get damaged again from her dormmates jumping on them. It appeared that Scruffy Billy and Scruffy Susie were up already, for the floor in front of their sleeping cubicles was already a mess. the dream may not have seemed like much, Kristen thought, but it brought forth a plethora of feelings she hadn't examined until now, till after the collapse, when her father and two older brothers had been killed and she was left to stay with her mother, who was being lost to her bit by bit, day by day, to the radiation sickness that finally took her dignity and her life.

It had started slowly, with Kristen trying to pump her with the then-ineffectual detoxifying fluids, but as they lost the battle, Loretta Calvin, Kristen's mother, who had nurtured her through childhood up to that point began to develop the terrible rad mutations. First, it had been the third arm growing out of her chest, which her mom had gamely joked about. then it had been the third eye, after which she had said, "When we get a cookie jar, and real cookies again, you won't be able to put one up on me and try to steal any." But the worst thing to watch, at least for Kristen, had been the Down's syndrome, drooling, and other mental illnesses which had happened almost simultaneously, almost three weeks later. It mattered not that their fallout shelter had been deemed safe by their father, who had worked in a chemical plant and had experience in working around heavy levels of radiation. It mattered not that they had stockpiled anything medical that they could get their hands on. Since their neighbor, Denise Carmichael, had been a nurse, she had passed out as many supplies as she could to those of her neighbors who had survived the collapse.

She remembered what had happened that Morning just as clear as day. Daddy had overslept and had rushed out the door to go to his job at Aiko Chemical Plant on the Western Highway. Kristen had been bundled off to Freedom City Elementary on the aging school bus and school had started at 8 A.M. sharp just as usual. Mrs. Hopkins, the equally-aging teacher had just received the homework after they had all said the People's Republic of California's version of the Pledge of Allegiance. they had just started talking about times tables and what they were when an almighty boom shook the building, as if it were being torn up by the roots. the whole class had been plunged into darkness, and the pandemonium had commenced. Tanya, her best friend, and 10 other classmates of hers had died that day, but that wasn't the worst...

Kristen wrenched herself out of the memories with a jolt and then, and only then, realized that she was shaking. then she heard the sounds of a struggle downstairs. Some guy's voice, that she couldn't recognize from far away, and her dormmate Tiffany's. It was then that she realized that the guy down there intended to kill her. though Kristen was now in a blind panic, she tried to corral her thoughts and actions into an orderly line. It wasn't an uncommon occurrence for kids in the orphanage to get killed. In fact, next door to the orphanage was a municipal recycling building. A cheerful poster on the front of the window exhorted people to recycle their dead, and the result was those ugly-tasting soylent reds that Kristen had come to loath so much. She didn't realize she was running...doing this even though Sister Agnes and Alvin told them not to run, but she was. From the dorm areas, around the corner in a corridor that had had most of the plaster knocked out of its walls at one time or another, and to the upper lobby, which was little more than a balcony overlooking the main lobby below, with the door to sister's office set into the western wall. Glancing briefly over the railing as she descended the curving stairway at a dead run, not caring for herself if the rail would give way at that moment, she gaged her soon to be surroundings, but she couldn't' see what was going on. The angle was all wrong. The main lobby of the orphanage must have been an impressive lobby at one time, but it seemed to have fallen into serious disrepair in the years or decades or however long it had been since the Collapse. The ceiling extended up to the second floor, giving the room a cavernous feel, and allowing any floating dust to get up a good head of steam by the time it made it into the upper areas. A sort of makeshift play area for the orphans was set up beyond an archway in the northern wall. A set of large wooden doors hung slightly crooked in the eastern wall, which was cracked in many places and seemed to have shifted in its foundation. Kristen somehow managed to descend the stairs without going ass over teakettle and without the already-faulty rail breaking, hit the ground floor running, and saw a bloody corpse. It was Tiffany, and she was on the floor of the lobby of the orphanage, dead. Numerous rounds had punctured her skin and a few had made horrible exit wounds out of her small fragile-looking back. And there was 77Jeremy, whoever he was. Kristen didn't understand why he had a number in front of his name (that she would only discover later), but everyone called him Jeremy. He was one of the janitorial crew that kept the Weiland-Utani Corporation looking as best as it could post-collapse. He was dragging her class friend and bunkmate, who was brought into the Gein Foundation the same day she was to the Municipal recycling Center, to be turned into a soylent red.

Kristen didn't remember killing him, but she came to with blood and the jagged shards of a Dukes of Hazard ashtray in her hands, also covered with the blood of 77Jeremy, who was sprawled out on the opposite side of the orphanage lobby, with innumerable gashes. A shard of that same ashtray had been driven into his chest with sufficient force to lodge into his sternum, and judging by the bright scarlet color of the blood, someone said later, that the heart or a blood vessel near the heart had been punctured in the attack. Kristen was confined to the basement, but she had spent her time well. she had hidden some supplies that could be of use later in her cargo pants. She would take them to the Salvage shop for a little bit of extra money when the orphans were made to go to chapel or Sunday service.

The cellar was little more than a hole in the raw earth, its cinderblock walls long ago decayed by dripping water and earthquakes. Rats scurried through puddles of mud on the concrete floor. A thermostat was attached to one of the walls, and it wasn't uncommon to see some of the orphans playing around with it from time to time so they could exercise a bit of control over the furnace, as there'd been no toys in the playroom upstairs for longer than Kristen could remember. A doorless opening in the cellar's north wall gave on the boiler room. Kristen inspected it for a moment, wondering if it would provide her with a way out. A webwork of rusting pipes and brick chimneys, the boiler room throbbed and roared with heat and steam. She could feel the room pulse with barely-constrained energy, as if the boiler might finally fail and burst asunder at any moment. She made her way back into the main room of the cellar, wanting to be as far from the furnace as possible. After she'd first been thrown down the stairs and the door locked after her, she'd discovered a hole in the cellar's western wall and had somehow managed to squeeze through it, discovering a hidey hole of sorts on the other side. This dank little hideaway had kept the younger orphans safe for years from the rabid predations of their not so fortunate peers and the tyranny of the dread Sister Agnes, but lately it hadn't been used much, mostly thanks to its small size. A damaged chair was half buried in the dirt and a toybox, long devoid of toys, lay overturned near the hole that led back to the main area of the basement. After leaving the boiler room, she'd squeezed back through the hole, not wanting to make a visible target of herself. she knew she'd crossed a line and wasn't sure she wanted to be very visible at the moment. She inspected her surroundings for a moment, then did what she could to make herself comfortable. She didn't remember falling asleep, but she was awakened by voices.

"You know this kid has been trouble since the word go," said the first voice, interrupting Kristen's mental planning, "I think it's time that we do something about her. Jonathan Weyland's going to be on our ass good about this."

"I have just the perfect idea," said Sister Agnes, whispering in a voice that she thought nobody could hear. "I would need to clear this with our local Yakatisma chapter's head, who knows Jon very well. And he would be able to talk to the cultists, who in turn could prepare the ceremonies for this."

"No!" said Alvin. "You're not meaning..."

"We sacrifice her to the Shoggoth, for our health and the health of Weiland-Utani, which butters our bread! They will reward us richly for our efforts, and will give us the soul of this wandering child in return for our sacrifice."

"We've had to do too much of this already. It won't continue to be kept quiet for very long." Alvin rejoined agitatedly.

"there is that, but there is also Plan B. In the meantime, we will sacrifice the corporeal shell of Kristen Calvin as recompense for the trouble she has caused here at the gein Foundation..."

the red haze was being superimposed over her visual field, and then she remembered the time that her sister Talia had been kidnapped by a bad man a year and a half Before the collapse had happened, by someone who wasn't her father anymore, not since mom had divorced him and married a very nice grownup she had been seeing Before the divorce had been finalized. "just remember that I married your real daddy, and he loves all of us," she had said. Kristen had searched for her too, and found her, in the haunted mansion that was six blocks down the road that was now being converted by the druggies and crackheads into their own personal crack mansion. there had been a makeshift altar constructed in the ballroom, with a Pentagram in red chalk drawn out beside it. Then she saw the worst thing she could've ever seen in her young life...the body of her younger sister Talia, charred, but still recognizable, and headless burning on that altar. the empty skull's face had looked up at her, as if pleading for her help, and suddenly she was running...running back to her house. It was hours and hours Before she could tell her mom everything. She didn't want to go on this mental lack of joyride, but as she lay in her dirty refuge below the orphanage, she was reminded of this.

A shadowy figure moved in the sewers beneath freedom city, a figure that carried its own light source, dim though it was. It moved from tunnel to tunnel, keeping a wary eye out for anything moving. It was true that the source of movement the figure encountered could be a rat, but it could equally be one of the number of chuds (creatures that had once been human but had mutated thanks to a combination of toxic chemicals and radiation) that lived down there (some were intelligent and had built a society of sorts in the tunnel network beneath the city, but others had gone animalistic, and those were the ones to watch out for). The animalistic ones had formed packs, each one headed by an alpha chud referred to, for some unknown reason, as a charnald. The intelligent ones possessed no such pack structure as such, but were known to sometimes move about in groups of three or four, but there were exceptions to that rule. The word "chud" had two meanings. On the streets of freedom city and the neighboring suburbs of Slagtown and Gangland, it meant "cannibalistic humanoid underground dweller", but those who knew a bit about the creatures' origins knew that the letters of the name stood for "contamination hazard urban disposal". Since the collapse, it was difficult to distinguish between myth and reality, but it was said that weiland Utani had been responsible for the chuds' existence thanks to an attempt of theirs to dispose of toxic waste cheaply and beneath the notice of all who lived above their proposed waste dump. The toxic chemicals, chuds, and reptiles that lived in the sewers didn't negate the necessity of repairs on water valves and power transformers beneath the streets, and since Weiland Utani's employees didn't seem to be in any hurry to shuck their asses down there and fix them, the repair work was left to those citizens of Freedom City and the surrounding areas who had a bit of repair skill.

The figure came to a junction of tunnels, saw a ladder to a manhole and ascended into the light of early morning. The light revealed the figure to be a young man, or what appeared to be a young man. The skin of his face was pale and some of it was peeling. His bare arms were likewise peeling. It almost looked as if he were decaying. Anyone who knew him would have known that that was indeed the case. The young man was a zombie. One of the restless undead that prowled the streets in some areas of Slagtown and Gangland, but he was different from the usual run of the mill shambling undeads. An informing intelligence lit his eyes, he was dressed in conventional armor gear consisting primarily of chudskin, and he had a rifle of sorts slung at his back within easy reach. At his side he carried a cooler. He walked south from the manhole, turning off a portable electric lantern as he went, toward the edge of freedom city, moving toward Slagtown. He moved slowly, not just because of his undead state, but also because he was currently in no particular hurry. The Any Port bar was closed, so fat ratzo wouldn't be conducting his rather interesting form of business just yet, which meant no packages to deliver.

The zombie crossed into Slagtown, stopping outside a seven story apartment complex, the outside of which had seen better days. A sign over the entrance read "bradbury apartments". The building was constructed in a rather interesting way. The center of the building had once been a glassed in dome, but the glass in question had broken long ago, leaving the area below which had once been a greenhouse of sorts open to the elements. He paused there for a moment, listening to the sounds of the awakening city he'd just left behind. Some people were already up and about, the soda machine at Fourth and High was doing a brisk business, a couple wild dogs were rooting in trash cans, and music was already coming from the sound system in The Giggling schoolgirl, the strip club on High Street. Soon ammu nation, a shop that specialized in pretty much everything that could be used to cut or beat someone to death would open, as would Protect Your Neck and Cover Your Ass, a shop next door to ammu Nation that specialized in more than a few types of low grade armor. After those two shops opened, any Port In a Storm would follow suit, and the zombie's work could begin.

As the city awakened further, the zombie turned from the bradbury apartments and made his way back along fourth avenue toward the growing clamor, stepping aside when a couple of monkeys came up the street. He had no clue where the monkeys had come from, but it was more than likely that they'd escaped from some pre collapse zoo or other. they were more than a bit of a problem these days, as were the wild dogs that infested Freedom city. In the aftermath of the Collapse, surviving domesticated dogs, now without a master, would often band together and mate at insane rates. After a few years, the new pups were numerous and feral. Many of them died from disease, often rabies. Those that didn't roamed the wilderness and Freedom City unchecked, scrounging for scraps of food. Many dogs would attack without provocation. In Freedom City, dogs weren't a protected species, so it was safe to attempt to kill them. For many citizens, they were often good fodder for training and food, though they could be somewhat dangerous to the unskilled and unprepared. Sometimes he and other citizens who possessed skills with one weapon type or another killed the things, but it was too early in the morning for that at the moment. As he crossed onto High street's six-hundred block, he noticed a human figure approaching him. he looked, sighed in resignation, and wished that the freedom city Police department cameras weren't either active or present. If he attacked the figure in any way, the nearest FCPD camera would flash a red light and turn in his direction, and then the k-9 units, powerful robotic dog-like machines, would be all over him like stink on a wild chud. The figure approaching him was a spammer, a human/cyborg hybrid that had been a popular marketing tool in the days Before the collapse. These people or creatures or whatever you wanted to call them had a habit of accosting people on the streets without so much as a "by your leave" and attempting to sell them some defunct hair care product or anti aging pill. This spammer, who went by the name of Kidneys S. faulty, was a particular annoyance. He or she or it or whatever in fuck's name it was seemed to home in on people with more regularity than any other and spew out more unintelligible crap than any other.

As the spammer approached, the zombie began searching for a place to hide, at first found none, then ducked into ammu Nation, hoping that Walter would send kidneys S. Faulty packing if it or whatever decided to come in there and start trying to sell something that hadn't existed since Before the collapse.

To the zombie's delight, the spammer continued on down High street, possibly getting ready to try selling something to the well Bot in Meds For Less. After he was sure the spammer wasn't going to retrace its steps, the zombie left ammu Nation and continued his interrupted walk down fourth Avenue. He reached the any Port bar just as Care Dog, the bar tender and owner of the establishment, was unlocking the door. The zombie waited a moment, walked in, gave care Dog a thumbs up, and as he usually did, took a look around to see who had managed to slip into the bar through some hidden entrance Before the place had actually opened.

The main ground floor room of any Port consisted of a large, somewhat dingy bar. Most of the surfaces were some variant of plexiglass or cheap wood laminate, which hadn't helped them stand up to a constant barrage of stubbed-out cigarettes, thrown darts, and the occasional gunfight. Various odds and ends intended to be either thought provoking or just creepy were hung from the walls, several recognizable models of decapitated droid heads, and the flared hood of a skinned dust viper, a variety of mutant snake usually found in the irradiated wastes east of freedom City. A plexiglass bar, where care dog held court, stretched the length of the back wall. There was a space in the center of the room set aside for dancing, that is when the jukebox was working, which wasn't often. A staircase led up to another room, which was coined the "upstairs lounge", but very few people actually went up there to do any lounging. Another stairway led down to a public toilet that very few people actually used, thanks to its not having been cleaned since Before the Collapse. care dog had tried it and ended up in what passed for a hospital in slagtown for his troubles with some sort of infection, as had his assistant, veronica moser, a woman who was thought to be the post-collapse equivalent of a bar whore, who spoke with a German accent, played bouncer for Care Dog if there were too many people for the man himself to handle, and who almost always could be found in Any Port, but there was a lot more to Veronica Moser. For one thing, she was anything but a bar whore. No one in Freedom city knew precisely what she was, and it was doubtful that anyone would find out any time soon.

The zombie ascended the stairs to the upstairs lounge and took in the details of the latter room as well, primarily since there was an open door that led up to the building's roof and to a makeshift helipad. It wasn't unknown for a citizen with killing on his or her mind to utilize the handholds and footholds on the side of the building left there during the attempts to repair the place and make it usable to reach the roof and enter via that door and set of stairs. A few people the zombie had recently met were known to use those self same footholds and handholds too to creatively take care of animals and people who had killing on their minds by launching attacks on them from above. Although the second floor couldn't really be considered a proper floor, nor could the upstairs lounge be considered a room in the accepted sense. A narrow balcony ran around the inside of the bar, lined with fat metal tubes that were no doubt very fashionable at some distant time in the past. The scum of Freedom City, apparently, floated up there and came to rest, as the place was almost constantly marked by the signs of some sort of minor battle. A door on the western side of the balcony was marked "VIP Room", but no one seemed to know exactly who used it. In the exact center of the balcony space reclined a man of such a size that it would have been impossible for him to descend the stairs or exit the bar. This was fat ratzo, although he'd been known by another name Before the collapse, but the zombie didn't know what said name had been. He only knew that fat ratzo was feared to such an extent in freedom city and the surrounding areas that very few people would think of crossing him, but respected enough that no one called him fat Ratzo behind his back. when you were that big, you took the name you were given and either simply lived with it or made it a name to be feared and respected, which ratzo had done. Beside Fat Ratzo stood a BJ9, a robotic construct that was part medical droid, part soldier robot, and part metallic ass kicker. it was rumored that Ratzo had hacked the systems of this particular BJ9 and made it his own personal right hand man. It was true that the thing was known to medic him when he needed it, and stood guard over him constantly, and that it had handed more than one person who'd decided to attack fat ratzo their asses on a figurative platter.

On this particular morning, Ratzo wasn't alone in the spot from which he held court. A young woman with blond hair, blue eyes, and a stunning figure stood beside him, one of her hands linked with one of his. The zombie approached fat Ratzo, gave a smile to the woman whom he'd seen around a few times, gave Fat ratzo himself a nod, and held out his hand.

"If you can do a few things for me," Fat Ratzo said, "maybe we can talk about something really big. I've got some packages to deliver, which you've already done a few times, and some bounties what need executin'. And I want you to kill a cop, and go see my buddy 77Jack. I can always use a crank dealer. And I want that fucking crack mansion taken out. That crack mansion around the corner on Grand. It's the damn FCPD ruining my livelihood! Blow it to kingdom come and it's an easy five grand. And then there's the matter of hardware."

"what need?" the young woman asked with a roguish smile. "Nice grammar."

"Oh, hush, Bela," Fat ratzo rejoined, giving the woman's hand an affectionate squeeze.

"Hardware?" the zombie asked, wondering exactly what Fat Ratzo was going on about. He'd delivered packages a couple times Before, but had never seen ratzo in a chatty mood.

"You seen some of the hardware walkin' around this town? I'm talkin' serious boomsticks. I know this guy, 77Jack ..." fat ratzo paused for a moment, and then continued, after seeming to collect his thoughts, "yeah, 77Jack, lives up in the corpclave, y'know, but he's no feeb, I think he runs some scam on the pilheads up there. Anyway, he runs a little home business, deals in ah, hardware, right? You gotta impress 77Jack Before he'll even open the door for ya. Try at the shootin' range up there. He hangs out there a lot, the friggin' psychopath. He respects a guy who can handle a piece."

The zombie once again extended his hand and this time, Fat ratzo seemed to notice.

"I got a package here going to slim stabby," Fat ratzo said, holding out a brown paper wrapped package the size of two bricks, "two hundred and fifty dollars when you make the delivery. Oh, and Amato, take care out there. I hear that FCPD is on the move today for some fucked up reason. Maybe thanks to the bullshit that got started when FNN started spewing crap about this Left behind thing that W-U's going on about."

"What the hell's Left behind?" the woman beside Ratzo asked, "I haven't heard of it. Then again, I've not been watching the freedom City News Network all that much."

"Ha, the latest W-U scam?" Fat Ratzo said with a smile, "I'm pretty sure Slim Stabby knows the real score, he's been asking around about it a lot lately. And it's funny...some W-U scientist was down here the other night, approached me about some vague plan to sabotage the whole thing! I couldn't hardly fuckin believe it. Yeah, I think 3David was the guy's name? Pencil neck from the W-U tower. Said he wanted to 'bring down the whole vast charade', whatever the frick that means. I checked into the guy a little and it turns out he's a big deal, works up on the 13th floor. You won't even be able to get in there to talk to the guy unless you're a fulltime employee. I'd not try something like that though. Their security may be shit, but ..."

Before Ratzo could continue, a computerized voice spoke from the FCPD camera above him.

"fat ratzo, you are fined ten dollars for violation of the verbal morality statute."

"Oh go die in a fire," Fat ratzo told the camera, extending both of his middle fingers toward the permanently attached electronic device, "and go piss up a fucking rope too."

From somewhere below, the zombie heard the voice of Care Dog say, "There's that fucking fire again ..." and the voice of Veronica Moser, "and that fucking rope too ..."

As the zombie, Amato, left Any port, he heard the camera informing fat ratzo that he had once again been fined for violation of the verbal morality statute, and a moment later he heard the camera on the ground floor of the bar informing care Dog and Veronica Moser that they also had received a fine. . This made Amato once again wonder what exactly FCPD's game was. they had no problem with citizens robbing each other, raping each other, or scamming each other, but they set up a stupid law that cost you ten dollars every time you let loose with a good healthy swear word? The cameras also fined you if you stood in one spot for too long. Five dollars per fine, in point of fact.

The area immediately outside the any Port bar had, Before the collapse, been a business district, but it had been transformed into what the times demanded. the shattered towers of office buildings lined the street, some of which showed signs of hasty repairs to the first few stories. The Any Port bar had been constructed in what had once been the lobby of an office block, as had the crash Landing, a seedy hotel directly across the street from it. To the south of any port, old brick buildings that had clearly not originally been office buildings lined the street, with the gein Foundation orphanage on one side of the street, and the entrance to a small facility known as the Suicide Booth and and a municipal recycling center opposite it. On the front of this latter building was a sign which read "recycle your dead". Below this, someone had spraypainted the message "I'll recycle someone's ass today". The block south of the orphanage was mainly uninhabited, thanks to a fire that had happened in the relatively recent past, leaving behind buildings that appeared ready to collapse at a moment's notice, buildings that seemed to be composed mainly of shattered concrete and twisted rebar. Another block south, sheets of rusty salvaged metal patched together the buildings that lined the intersection of 4th and High street. From there, the Slagtown galleria Mall sign could clearly be seen, as could the entrance to 8/20 Memorial Park. And everywhere, mounted on poles on every block, were the cameras of the Freedom City Police Department. every move you made in public, whether it be on the streets or in a shop, was carefully monitored, and if the camera flashed a red light and turned its glass eye toward someone, the k-9 units were soon to follow, but the k-9 units were only the first wave. After the k-9 enforcers came the C350s, humanoid robots that would have looked threatening, if it weren't for the flashing red lights and siren horns mounted on their heads. Those who had gotten a good look at one of those couldn't figure out whether to feel threatened or like they'd been the butt of someone's not too clever joke. Following the C350s came the swat officers, who looked totally human, apart from the in-built body armor that seemed to be a part of their skin. And if swat officers weren't enough, acting Police Chief McBain would show up himself to deal with said offender. And the thing that called all of them was the camera network that covered the entirety of freedom city. They even had them in the park, God alone knew why.

Amato had been to 8/20 Memorial Park more than a few times, and didn't need to go there again to know that a few people had already congregated there. The park was a combination defunct picnic area, open air smoking area, and memorial to a relatively recent disaster that had overtaken freedom City. Amato didn't' know exactly what year it had happened, but he did know, thanks to the name of the place, that it had happened on the 20th of August of whatever year it had been. The entrance to the place was a truly green area and was relatively well kept, in fact it was one of the last green areas of the city and a sanctuary to those in search of peace in these hard times. The grass grew high, full of wildflowers and weeds. The trees were a mix of oak, evergreen, and a few towering redwoods, with blackberry bushes and ground nettle encroaching on the more landscaped areas. A disc golf basket was set up near the entrance for anyone who wanted to make use of it, and a park bench stood near a path that led to a grove of trees to the south, which was known for some reason as the Grove of Suicides, a circle of pines planted around an area about a city block in width, with two cement walkways which met at a crossroads in the exact center. Once one walked through the grove, they would find themselves standing both in Slagtown and near the memorial itself, a concrete representation of the business end of a ballistic missile resting on its tip surrounded by statues made to scale of citizens looking up in horror. The memorial had the letters CCLS stamped into its side and stood in the center of a circular concrete plaza ringed by brick steps. A short distance away from the memorial lay the ruins of a playground, the equipment long defunct, the only thing remaining to show that anything had ever been set up there being the crumbling blacktop squares, and if one walked a short distance south from the playground, they found themselves near one of the bradbury's blank ground floor walls. If one entered the monument and ascended the stairs to the top, they would see a large plaque with the following message inscribed on it.

"8/20. A day that will forever live in infamy for the people of Freedom City. At 7:40pm standard time, a nuclear explosion detonated in the midst of Freedom City upon this very spot, consuming also the neighboring suburbs of Slagtown and Gangland. In the blink of an eye, thousands were vaporized. The terrorist attack was timed perfectly, the dinner hour. Families gathered around 'Bukkake Island' on the holopanel, eating their delicious city-provided soylent, then disintegrated by the unholy power of the nuclear attack. Men and women died, asphyxiated in the subway tunnels, trapped inside their damaged apartments, some even killed on their way to the suicide booth. In the aftermath, an equally shocking tragedy was unleashed. The Any Port, a bar turned relief station, was suicide-bombed by an unknown party. This terrible atrocity claimed the lives of many who had survived the explosion, and the nurses and doctors attempting to prevent further loss of life. FCPD officer McBain had survived the initial attack, but even he was unable to prevent the horror. When the status quo finally returned, CCLS claimed that the explosion resulted from a test in Maas-Neotek. The test was to see whether radiation from a nuclear explosion would transfer through an active portal gate. It could. However, your vigilant government was quickly able to place blame for the atrocity where it belonged, upon the heads of the southern Chomologists of New Clearwater. Fear, despair and anguish turned to burning anger and ice-cold hatred: The only good Chomo is a dead Chomo. Conspiracy theorists believe that CCLS was working for them (and perhaps the Maas-Neotek Hepcats) in some capacity, but this has not been proven. The Marked of Caine claimed that the bombing was justice delivered upon the decadent people of Freedom City. Other corporations only attempted to pick up the pieces of their broken empires. This shocking event will always live on in the minds of all good Freedom Citizens everywhere and serve as a lesson about the harsh nature of our brave new world. 8/20: Never forget."

Amato was familiar with the concept of portal gates. The technology to create temporary two-way energy conduits through which matter could be transported had been rediscovered relatively recently, but the process didn't work very well on living things. He was also familiar with the names given on the plaque. CCLS was one of the gangs that styled themselves as "corporations", the Marked of Caine was a group that lived near a long dead city who worshipped a mutant creature as a god, the hepcats were a group of extremely augmented teens who lived in the neighboring city of Maas Neotek and who hated anyone not their own, including freedom citizens, chomologists, Wasteland mutants, and pretty much the entire human race, and the Chomologists were a group of extremists who lived in the settlement of New Clearwater which lay across a radiated and poisoned patch of desert known as the wastelands and who had been at war with both Freedom city and Maas Neotek for longer than anyone could remember. The multiple instances of blame for the 8/20 incident didn't surprise Amato. After all, if the citizenry of Freedom City didn't have someone to blame, they might start asking questions. and if there was one thing the power structure consisting of the weiland-Utani corporation and its unseen overlord Mondo corp didn't like, it was people asking questions. Questions led to answers, answers led to possible actions, and possible actions led to problems for the power structure, and from what fat Ratzo had said, the power structure possibly had a few problems on their way thanks to the scientist who had approached him and said something about the Left Behind project.

As Amato moved from block to block, dismissing the thoughts of 8/20 and weiland-Utani for the time being, headed for the riverfront area of freedom city, he scanned his surroundings just in case someone was getting ready to spring an ambush on him. It had happened Before, after all.

As it turned out, no one was waiting to attack him and he turned onto 3rd Avenue without incident. One block north of 3rd and High, the door to Freedom city's clone bank, clone arrangers, stood open. Amato entered the facility, sparing a single glance at the equipment Before exiting the building through the open rear door that gave on river street. He made his way south to the loading docks where slim stabby, the man in charge of freedom City's port facilities could usually be found and after looking around to make sure he was unobserved, handed him the package. The credit chip built into Amato's wristpad beeped to confirm a transaction and the figure displayed on the device's screen changed to reflect his current financial situation.

As had been the case a couple times Before, Amato asked slim stabby what exactly was in the packages. During the previous occasions, Stabby had been busy dealing with the final preparations on a boat that was about to leave port, but this time, no such thing was happening.

"Ratzo sends out the packages and I take the delivery. No need for any of us to trouble our minds with more than that, hey? I've known him since back Before the W-U, since the Syndicate days in gangland. He'll do right by you."

"You're not the only person he sends those packages out to," Amato said, "he also has them going to Agnes in the orphanage, among others."

"Ha, that sow?" stabby responded, "god, she makes me sick, her and that creepo Alvin. That thing in the basement, with the kids...it ain't ok. The syndicate doesn't like it much. Although I'd not call us a syndicate, we're more of a neighborhood watch, in my opinion. But we've got to be careful. not sure what ratzo's deal with sending her packages is, but most likely it ain't the same stuff as I get, or that ghost dog gets, or that Johnny fiveaces gets, for that matter."

Having decided he wasn't going to find out what the packages contained, Amato changed his line of inquiry and ventured a question concerning Left behind.

"Left Behind ... ha!" Stabby responded, "Another W-U scam. Main thing I know is, I got buyers lined up all the way to China for the tech coming out of there. I just need someone to get it out. Here's what I know about the payload, it's a metal suitcase, held by a guy name of Chance. He works in the Operations Center somewhere in the W-U tower. You get the case to me, and you make fifty-thousand dollars. Don't ask what's inside. You wouldn't ask, right? Nah. Getting in there isn't gonna be easy. During the day it's too active, and at night you can't get in at the ground level. There's a junction box on the roof you might be able to hack."

"I doubt I'd be able to do much hacking," replied Amato, "being a zombie gives you some somewhat serious deficiencies in the brains department, unless you get yourself filled with W-U implants, and some of us don't want that."

"Understandable," stabby answered, "No one really knows everything those little microcircuit things do apart from what's advertised in that clinic in Corpclave. best to steer clear of them, if at all possible."

Amato left the loading docks and made his way back toward any Port, getting out of the way quickly when an enforcer droid came lumbering down the street on the heels of a Slagtown scumbag who went by the name of sanju. He wasn't afraid the droid would attack him without sanju attacking first, but enforcer droids sometimes had a habit of knocking people down if they didn't move and move quickly out of their way.

Amato delivered a few more packages, getting paid each time, but then decided that package delivery was not the activity he wanted to have consume his entire day. He'd been awake for a few hours already, most of that time spent below ground repairing water valves and power transformers, not to mention killing any chuds or sewer gators that got too close or decided to attack him. He returned to the Bradbury Apartments, noticing that Roy Poorman, one of the staff, was standing in the center of the room. The words "faded grandeur" were coined for the bradbury's lobby, and indeed the entire building. Seven stories of apartments surrounded a central atrium, each a wraparound balcony with wrought iron railings. A pair of elevators, broken for years but with one recently restored, rose on either side of the terraces. What was once a lovely garden was now a packed-flat refuse dump choked with dead weeds. Far overhead, the smashed out greenhouse roof did nothing to protect from the elements. A sign over the door to the north read "Showers". A heavy steel door leading to a security office was set into the south wall, and it wasn't uncommon to see Norman and/or Irving with a number of gorilla bots and owlmen there, and if not there, then in the room west of the lobby, a room most residents referred to simply as "The Throwaway Place". It was also not uncommon to see people dumpster diving in the latter room, although why anyone would wish to do such a thing was beyond Amato. A wide wrought iron staircase led up to the first floor. A metal trapdoor was set in a corner of the floor. It was covered in green crusty stains. Someone had spraypainted the word "zombie" on the metallic surface of the trapdoor. Amato looked at his surroundings for a moment, crossed the lobby, avoiding the fallen plaster and weeds that grew up through the cracking cement floor, entered the public shower and cleaned up, climbed the stairs to the sixth floor after inspecting the control panel of the Bradbury's only working elevator and finding the damn thing out of order once again, entered his apartment, and plugged his electric lantern into a wall socket for recharging.

The apartment was a small two room affair, consisting of a main room which served as a combination living room, kitchen, bedroom, and all round catch all, and a bathroom, which was a great deal cleaner than the main room, not that the condition of the main room was Amato's fault. He attempted to keep the place as clean as he could, but plaster dust had a nasty habit of falling from the walls and ceiling, various types of dirt and ash routinely blew in from the windows, which didn't quite close all the way, and more grit of various kinds had a habit of somehow making its way in under the door, even though the thing was supposed to be sealed and even though he had a roomba activated.

As he squatted on the air mattress, wondering where his girlfriend was, he turned on the CRT television, a thirteen inch color TV rather like those old pre collapse portable televisions long haul truckers kept in the cabs of their vehicles during the later years of the 20th century, not that such measurements of time and date meant much these days, and tuned it to freedom News Network, the only channel that didn't show a view from either the Weiland Utani building, Any Port, the Hellfire Club where you could be almost assured of seeing a few people get themselves killed in interesting ways, or somewhere else in Freedom City where someone had hacked the FCPD cameras and projected their feed to an unused TV channel. It was true that FNN spent most of its time spewing pro-Weiland Utani propaganda, but every now and again you saw a news story that was at least half way interesting.

A being with leathery gray skin, glowing yellow eyes protected behind dark glasses, a hunched profile, red hair that seemed a bit out of place on such a creature, and black claws sprouting from her knuckles moved through the tunnels beneath freedom city, making for one of the manhole entrances to the world above, a place she and her kind thought of as "above the stone sky". . She had work to do up there and no matter how she was feeling, she had to do it or go without cash, and if she had no cash, she would soon be reduced to hunting live meat like her less fortunate animalistic cousins, a great many of whom finished up falling to chudhunters from various areas of the city.

The work ahead of her consisted of some package deliveries for fat ratzo, some sales of meat to the crazy man who worked the kitchen at Jack and Wendy's Box, scrounging for junk the man in the local salvage shop would want to pay hard cash for, and a few other small jobs Before she could return to her home and rest.

She hated the light, hated being outside with "the outside empty sky" the only roof, hated the way it made her feel, but she had no choice in the matter, just as she had no choice but to be who she was and what she was. the world had taken that choice away from her from the moment her Mother had whored herself to a chobo and given birth to her, had hated the gray skinned, hunched, fanged and clawed creature she'd given birth to and dumped her in the lobby of the orphanage in downtown freedom city. After a short time, she'd run from the orphanage and had hidden in the sewers, where she instinctively knew she'd be safe from the light, the open air, and the other orphans, who had made it a point to be cruel to her.

She'd followed the wails that had come from below, and had eventually discovered an entire community of creatures like herself, but after meeting her first dweller from above-ground, she quickly realized that most of them weren't exactly like her. She could think and reason, but a great many of the other ones couldn't or wouldn't. At first she'd theorized that they couldn't, but after meeting a few people above-ground, she changed that theory to fit what she now suspected. a great many chuds chose not to use the intelligence they'd been born with, choosing instead to follow their animalistic instincts, which were always close to the surface. . She'd learned to speak thanks to the friends she'd made above-ground, but she also could communicate utilizing the chud wails. The wails contained a wealth of information, and when said wails came from intelligent chuds, entire conversations could be carried on with a single wail exchanged between two of them. If they came from the animalistic variety, the only information they contained was raw hunger and savagery.

She came to a tunnel junction and stopped for a moment, inspecting the debris at her feet. There were a pair of broken skulls down there, which meant that the zombie she'd seen a few times had been down there fixing things for the freedom city Utility commission. thanks to this, she knew she was in the correct area, but she didn't really need the added knowledge of Amato's recent presence. She, like all her kind, possessed an almost flawless sense of direction whilst underground and in the dark, said sense vanishing almost completely in the unfiltered light of the outside sky and the artificial light sources that came on automatically after the sun had set, hence the dark glasses protecting her eyes. But nothing could counter the stress she felt with no roof over her head. The ability to remain in the open for overly long periods of time would always be beyond her.

She reached a ladder leading up to a manhole and she climbed it, scenting the air as she did, noting that Amato had passed there not very long since, and turned away from freedom city and deeper into slagtown, just missing being knocked down by an enforcer droid by a couple of inches. She walked, almost skulked, along the street, attempting to keep in constant sight of some form of solid construct until she reached her first destination, a small bar/restaurant combination which sported a sign over the door reading "Round Corner". She raised her head, glanced about for a moment, and walked inside, giving a nod to one of the men seated behind the main counter.

"Hey Johnny," she said in a voice that was recognizably female, but at the same time extremely rough, "what's up?"

"Hey christini," the man she'd addressed responded, "what can I get ya?"

"Same as usual," Christini replied, "unless someone's been hunting tusker and brought you some bellies to make bacon out of."

"None yet," answered Johnny, "but Amato and Sofia should be along in a bit and I'll send them out to the western highway to bring some back."

"Damn!" christini exclaimed, "and here I was hoping for some bacon."

"You and about five-hundred other people," laughed Johnny.

Christini moved to the back of the room, past a pool table which had had one of its legs either knocked off or destroyed at some point in the recent past, into an area where the lights were out, and slid into a booth. this area had been prepared especially for her and those like her. The ceiling had been lowered and light absorbing panels had been hung in place of the usual wall panels. Johnny had done that almost immediately after it had become apparent that not all chuds were wild animalistic killers who attacked people and wailed about it afterwards. After she'd situated herself, she reached into an obviously homemade purse and took out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, lit up, and smoked in silence until her meal was brought to her. The meal in question consisted of eggs and some sort of meat (probably smoked beefalo) and Johnny had brought her a hot drink to go with it. This drink wasn't tea or coffee, but something called soycaff. It tasted like warmed over sewage, but if you wanted a hot drink in Freedom city or slagtown, it was soycaff or nothing. If you were fortunate enough to live in the Burbclave, you could probably count on getting actual tea or coffee, but the couriers who brought the stuff from wherever they got it from never showed their faces in the poorer quarters. Far far too easy to get them ripped, shot, cut, or bitten off so their attackers could get their hands on the cargo they carried.

After she'd finished her meal, she left round corner and made her way north to the place where slagtown became freedom city, but ducked into an alley when she heard the obvious sounds of a struggle coming down the street from the north. She poked her head out a bit and saw Alvin, the creep from the orphanage, carrying a girl over his shoulder and making for the Bradbury. This wasn't the first time Christini had seen such a thing. Alvin had a habit of throwing trouble kids, as he called them, into the basement of the bradbury. Usually said trouble kids never came back, at least not as themselves. There were zombies down there, after all, and what usually came back out of the basement was as mindless as the animalistic chuds.

"He sure looks pissed," christini thought as Alvin passed her hiding place, "I wonder what this one did that the other ones he usually chucks down there didn't."

The sun rose over the ruined port of Freedom City, with its jagged teeth for buildings and its cracked and gutted infrastructure, but Kristen wasn't able to get any sleep at all. The wheels were turning in her young mind. Would she be able to get away with going to Weezer Village using the Helipad after delivering a few packages for Fat Ratzo? Sister Agnes would yammer on about how her good works would get her into heaven. If she got four delivered she might be able to escape, pawning off the excuse on the no-good sister that she was saving the money to give to a Catholic Church the next time she found one. But she knew where that money was going. she knew damn well where it was going, and neither the cops nor the sister could prevent her from saying these supposedly bad words in her mind. She was going to take advantage of the first struggle that seemed advantageous to her purpose, and whatever happened, she'd try not to look at who was getting killed and who was killing them. It really wasn't going to help her or them if she got stopped, and if she could establish herself in Weezer Village or someplace like that, she would be able to help those who were still there.

She rose from her bunk, to which she'd returned after night had fallen, and made her way into the bathroom which was connected to both dormitories, noticing as she did that someone had, for some reason known only to them, managed to plug several of the toilets, resulting in a small flood of discolored water on the floor. several sinks with mirrors over them were set into one of the walls, and opposite these was an area set aside for what passed for cleaning up. Rusty shower heads hung from the ceiling, and water dripped from most of them, even when they were supposedly turned completely off. When they were turned on, the most one could usually expect from them was a faster, more insistent drip, but it was enough to wash with, if you had about forty-five or so minutes to kill. She sponged herself with water and the gritty soap which was all they had now, and trotted down to the dilapidated dining hall with its cracked linoleum and caved-in ceiling to receive her breakfast, this time sausage and eggs. She inspected her surroundings as she made her way to what passed for a table, knowing that she'd pissed sister Agnes and possibly Alvin off as well, and didn't want either of them creeping up on her. The dining room was a large, dimly lit room with a beautiful stained glass window dominating the southern wall. Unfortunately, someone had been throwing rocks through the windows, so the scene was more surreal than it was reverent, with beams of dust and light streaming in through the holes. An archway to the north led into a classroom and she could see the kitchen through a doorway that seemed just the slightest bit out of true. She was surprised at the contents of her tray, because sausage and eggs seldom, if ever got served to the orphans. the sausage tasted funny though, as if it was composed of a variety of meats. One of them, Kristen realized with a shock of revulsion, had to be chudmeat. Chudmeat was just about the nastiest, most gross thing to eat, especially early in the morning, besides Soylent reds, which the orphans got most mornings. But sometimes chuds, which were horribly mutated beings, which one never thought could have been human beings at one time because of what those mutations did to them, would come up from the sewers in Freedom City. That was when the chudhunters (as Sister Agnes called them) would either wait at the manholes and pick the ones that had surfaced off, or crawl down into the stinky sewers with their weapon of choice, preferably a rifle or a relatively high-quality blade or whip at their side, and a few belt lights or electric lanterns in their pack and a kidney cooler for storing meats to take to Chudburger in Slagtown. As talk went, when Jeech, the proprietor of the place, was receiving too much of a bumper crop of chudmeat, it ended up in the orphanage freezer, to be mixed with porcuswine, chukka, alligator, caiman, or crocodile, as well as dog and monkey meat. This is why she and all the others in the orphanage had to be extremely hungry to eat the sausages that were prepared in the orphanage kitchen, not only for these reasons, but Sister Agnes wasn't such a good cook, so even if the sausages had been composed completely of porcuswine, they most likely still would have reminded her of trying to force down a rubber tire covered in shit.

But on this particular morning, Kristen forced down the sausage with the eggs, which were not bad in and of themselves, though the sausage left a taste in her mouth fit to choke a horse. this is why, when breakfast was done, she slipped out of the orphanage for a moment, bought a Mingus Dew from the decrepit and battered soda machine outside the facility, and that stifled it somewhat.

However, the sight that met her eyes when she returned to the wrecked lobby with its cavernous ceiling and the dining room door off the hinges did not comfort her or relax her. In fact, it enraged her. Alvin was playing a very different game of house with tiny April than she and her friends had grown up playing. He had her pants down and was touching her in places grown-ups didn't normally touch on kids. Before she realized what she was doing, Kristen ran forward, yelling "Stop it right now!" to Alvin in her loudest voice yet, running right into him. She jammed her fist in his gut, and the other fist in his back, but that didn't prevent the beanpole of a man from thunking her first in the shoulder with the butt end of his fire ax, and then in the gut, and then in the throat, though not hard enough to do lasting damage. If he'd decided to use the bladed side of the fire ax's head, he'd most likely have put a very large hole in her right then and there, decorating the lobby with blood, bone fragments, and pieces of brain.

'Well, should we let the Shoggoth get you, or the zombies in the Bradbury Basement, who love to eat the brains of stupid little girls that interfere with their elders teaching their classmates important life lessons..." With another jab in the arm with the fire ax, the human beanpole hefted her up and out of the orphanage, but in the position she was in, with her head pressed against his shirt, she couldn't see where they were going. to say that she was scared was an understatement, but she was also equally scared for her bunkmates in the girls' dormitory, and especially tiny April, whose dad had died in the collapse and left her with no mommy or daddy to take care of her.

"what are you doing with yet another child, Alvin?" a new voice asked, although she thought she recognized it as that of Roy Poorman who owned the Bradbury a few doors down from the orphanage. He had always been nice to her, and had sometimes brought her over a soda when she was parched.

"As I've told you time and time Before," Alvin said, his voice taking on a slightly mocking tone, "that's none of your concern, Roy. I thought you finally got that into that greasy-haired head of yours."

"I've told Sister Agnes over and over again that you're abusing your current position," Roy retorted, "and she doesn't listen. But I have the ear of the Mayor and the ear of Freedom City Police Chief McBain."

"And I told you that you shouldn't interfere when I'm taking care of business. Now nose out!" said Alvin ferociously, kicking Roy Poorman in the shin.

"Don't you tell me what to do in my own lobby!" Roy rose up imperiously, but Alvin was fucking with the trapdoor in the floor and suddenly, Kristen felt herself falling...falling...

It was dark down here, and it stank of mildew, mold, rot and bile. Stealthy footsteps approached her, as if the tenants of the basement were appraising her. She made her way through area after area of the basement, staying ahead of the steps she could hear, eventually locating a spiral stairway leading down into darkness. This she followed, curious about the greenish glow she could see down there. She reached solid ground, followed a tunnel for a short way, and found herself amongst broken coffins and pieces of rotted bone. She'd also managed to back herself into a corner. There was no way out but back the way she had come, and the slow, dragging footfalls she could hear were coming from that direction. She placed her back against the wall of the passage, prepared to fight. She saw several indistinct shapes picked out by the greenish glow which came from a jagged hole in the passage floor. Some of the shapes appeared to be mostly skeletal, others relatively fresh. She made for one of the skinless ones, but it was an immolated zombie that leaped at her first. Kristen smoothly dodged out of the way, but a sloppy zombie that looked like he or she had been burned in several places and one with no eyes at all quickly hemmed her in. Soon enough, the immolated zombie aimed a deadly claw strike at her throat, with a scream of "brrrrrraaaaaaaaiiiinssss! and the sloppy, burned one got her in the stomach. She kept fighting despite the warm wetness of blood that kept running down various places but not making a whole lot of progress, for suddenly she was inundated, but the first three zombies, and others who had joined them, all clamoring for her brain.

then one of the bastards tore hell out of her throat, no doubt slicing the jugular vein, and she knew no more...except that she was floating...floating in a misty place. She couldn't tell how big it was or really what the place was, but she felt no pain, and didn't even feel her body.

It was just then that she saw her mom, Loretta Calvin. She looked, if possible, even more beautiful than she did in life, but more sad too. She reached out her arms to Kristen and they hugged.

"I see someone tried to punch your ticket a bit too early...uh sorry kitten, but I'm not explaining myself. But you're not supposed to be dead just yet. I've been informed by a higher power that you have a higher purpose, and you can't quite accomplish it if you're up there playing harps and singing in the choir. that's not what we do, but I'll leave this to another time. what's important now, Kris, is two things. You will be sent back to where you were to complete your purpose. Second of all, with all mortals...I mean humans like we used to be an inch away from dying, you're better off with some help."

Mrs. Calvin seemed to furrow her brow, while Kristen sat in mute astonishment. "Let me see if I can explain this to you. You know what those beings are in the Bradbury Basement are, don't you?"

"they're zombies," said Kristen, "and they were after my brains."

"Well," said what Kristen thought must be her mom's spirit, "how would you like the opportunity to stay a zombie, because seeing that they got you, you've got zombie rot, which makes you one of them, but listen...don't twitch..." Mrs. Calvin smiled then, for she remembered Kristen's little twitch mannerism when something bothered her.

"So won't I go around trying to eat everyone's brains?" Kristen asked.

"You will be able to control whose head you take. And you will have most of your smarts. this is because you died fighting the inhabitants of the Bradbury Basement and your brain was flooded with adrenaline. Many many zombies don't have the opportunity you will be getting. You'll make a difference to the world, on two conditions," Mrs. Calvin's spirit-voice seemed to raise slightly on the last three words. 'You must always use it for good, and not to go after anyone who hasn't done anything to you. Can you do that for Mommy?"

Can I go after Alvin who messed with little kids, and that terrible Sister Agnes?" Kristen asked.

"It's not going to be something you'll be able to do right away. You'll have to learn like you used to, but there will be friends that will meet you later. they will find you and lead you to more ways to complete your purpose. Help them, as they will no doubt help you."

"I will, Mom," said Kristen. She would have cried then, but she couldn't. She wanted to be brave, and she physically couldn't even do so much as bat an eyelash.

"I miss you," said Kristen simply.

"And I miss you too, kitten-cat," said Mrs. Calvin, squeezing her...hand? Where was her hand? Where was she? What was she at that moment? "I don't know when we shall next meet, but it will be the right time. I hope, like you that it will be soon. Now do I have your word that you will not hurt anybody who doesn't deserve it, and that you will do good with what you will be given?"

"Yes...But...Mommy, won't I go crazy like those zombies in the basement did?" asked Kristen.

"I will not lie. I have been told that there will be times that you will, and won't be able to control when it happens, but you will be able to control who it's directed at. if you do join a corporation, they will want you to get rid of people who use their lives to do evil. Oh and another thing...don't have anything to do with weiland Utani, whatever you do. I know you're still a kid, but if you have to reclone in the vats, that process will make you grow up, and then you will know all about the evil that they do."

"I've heard the sister in the orphanage talking about them, and they sound like bad people. I won't do anything for them except what this guy at the orphanage does. He does an office job to make fun of them."

"Good. But have as little to do with them as possible. I must go, but you will resurrect in the pit, where you died. Just come up and out of the basement. the other zombies will not bother you. And, good luck. I'll be looking out for you."

Kristen told her mom that she loved her, and her mom said that she loved Kristen as well, and she woke up in the pit, feeling very strange.

She immediately felt the cold as more than a simple lowering of temperature and more as a physical thing. Her limbs at first moved stiffly, but as she continued to flex them, their mobility increased. She made her way back toward the entrance to the basement through which she'd been thrown, noticing that the zombies which had formerly come after her with homicidal intent were now simply standing or shambling about aimlessly, watching her. She approached a particular area of the basement that had at one point been subject to some sort of cave in and which was now filled with filthy water. There was no way around it, so she entered the water, her body recoiling at the shock of the increased cold, and then she was sinking. For a moment her mind was filled with a panicky desire to kick back toward the filtered light she could see above her, but then she noticed that she wasn't starving for air. She walked along the bottom of the flooded crevice, realizing that she didn't necessarily need to breathe. She reached the far side, kicked back toward the surface, and climbed up to solid ground, water dripping from what remained of her clothing. She approached the gate leading to the area of the basement directly beneath the metal trapdoor that led up to the Bradbury's lobby, the first pangs of hunger beginning to stir within her.

As Amato entered the Bradbury's lobby, he heard a muffled series of sounds coming from beneath the trapdoor in the corner. For a moment he wondered what had the zombies down there all excited, but Before he could investigate, the sounds ceased. He continued toward the door giving on 4th Avenue, figuring that the sounds down there had been caused by one or more zombies hearing people moving above them, and headed north toward Freedom city. He meant to deliver at least five packages, then, since his wristpad radio was currently on the blink, to check the rapid Reaction Center on the second floor of city Hall for news of possible dangers to freedom city. He then meant to leave the city entirely and spend a bit of time in the crater rim east of Slagtown hunting beefalo (a variety of cow/buffalo hybrid that had first been raised in captivity pre collapse but had run wild in the days since the Weiland Utani Corporation and its shadowy superior in the corporate scheme of things, "Mondo corp", had rebuilt the world in their own warped image). If he and others didn't occasionally hunt beefalo, jack And Wendy's box, the restaurant in the northeast quarter of freedom city would have nothing to serve apart from the usual meals consisting of dog, monkey, rat, or sewer bug meat (the dog meat usually finishing up in a dessert Carlos Hernandez referred to as "Puppy Puffs", the rest of the stuff finishing up in what was referred to on the menu as "Kids Combo Meals"), not to mention the occasional chunk of zombie meat that finished up in there as an unexpected extra.

Now there was a dangerous situation, as those who ate zombie meat finished up with zombie rot, a disease that finished the sufferer up as a zombie. On occasions during which the person afflicted with zombie rot died in combat or engaged in physical exertion, he or she retained most of their intelligence, all their memory, and could control the hunger for brains which was completely ungovernable in the less fortunate sufferers of the disease who died when the rot ran its course and reanimated them. Those unfortunates were indistinguishable from the zombies that had first begun emerging from the mass grave located under the Bradbury or the disused shopping mall in gangland's northeastern quarter shortly after The Collapse. Those zombies were utterly mindless, and had a nasty habit of attacking the living on sight and weren't too particular about what they ate, sometimes consuming most of the corpses of their victims as well as their brains. the more intelligent zombies also had the hunger as a part of their makeup, but they could decide who they went after, and indeed if the creature they went after was human or not. The consumption of brains not only satisfied the hunger, but enabled zombies of either kind to heal from injuries. Amato had discovered though, that he and probably all other zombies could still take nourishment from what living people called regular food, but said regular food didn't aid in the healing process. Also, Amato himself didn't think he wanted to partake of very much of the food that was sold in freedom city, apart from the pizzas the small restaurant between 4th and 5th Avenue sold. Unless he knew there'd been a beefalo hunt on any particular day, he knew he'd not be eating at Jack and Wendy's, especially after having seen Carlos Hernandez's food preparation and the sanitary conditions or lack thereof in the kitchen behind the restaurant's counter.

The place looked more like a combination killing floor and trash heap than a kitchen. The floor was usually slimy with drying blood and thick with leavings from the dogs, not to mention the occasional unlucky human being Carlos routinely butchered whilst alive and threw into the large industrial-sized refrigerator located in one corner of the filthy room. Amato had once managed to get a look inside that particular appliance, and was thankful that his diet consisted primarily of fresh brains. As revolting as some people found that to be, it was less so than the sight that had greeted him on that occasion. Bloody chunks of meat sat on filthy rusting shelves, most of said chunks weren't even wrapped in old newspapers. Blood had been dripping from the shelves and Amato was sure he'd seen maggots squirming in there, but that could have been his imagination.

Tearing his mind away from thoughts of Jack and Wendy's box and what the patrons of said restaurant may or may not have been taking into their systems along with the crap that Carlos Hernandez called food, Amato stopped for a moment and pressed a button on a cylindrical device clipped to his belt. The device in question began to hum and a moment later, a cup of water was dispensed into his waiting hand. Said device was a Jiffy-time water condenser, a handy little piece of equipment that had originally been manufactured Before the collapse, the plans for which had been rediscovered, along with the means to manufacture them in bulk, eliminating the need for refillable water containers. The Jiffy-time water condenser collected moisture from the air around its wearer and utilized the principle of natural condensation to convert the vapor into drinkable water. It was, of course, necessary to routinely restock the machine with cups, but those were easily come by for only a fraction of a dollar, as some people still insisted on calling the electronic credit which had taken the place of physical money a number of years Before the missiles had begun raining from the sky.

As he drank, he noticed movement coming from behind him. He turned in the direction from which it had come, back toward the Bradbury, and saw what he thought was a zombie shambling down the street toward him. He couldn't tell its gender from where he was, nor could he tell how fresh it was. What he could tell was that it was headed for the more populated areas of freedom city. there was a small gathering of people in 8/20 Memorial Park, and a zombie could possibly be trouble there. He turned fully toward it, watching its progress, wondering for a moment what it was doing out here. The run of the mill shamblers from the Bradbury's basement didn't usually walk the streets, but usually was the operative word. Sometimes they managed to escape their confinement down there and went on a rampage, killing anyone and anything they came into contact with.

"First thing in the morning," he thought, "just fucking wonderful."

He watched the zombie for a moment or two longer, then unslung his rifle into firing position, then reslung it around his back. The bullets that particular weapon fired weren't very effective against zombies unless someone managed to get in a few lucky head shots with it, and the shotgun he usually used against rogue shamblers was back in his apartment, safely locked in the weapons cabinet. He groped in the trail pack he wore for a moment, coming up with a bladed weapon that somewhat resembled an ice pick that had somehow managed to get a bit of time in at a local gym and turned fully toward the zombie, preparing to do something about it Before it could reach the growing group of people in the park, but a hand fell on his shoulder, causing him to turn.

"I don't think ya wanna be doin' that, Amato," the owner of the hand said, "first ya aim a plinker at her, then ya get out that poison pick? I swear sometimes you're too trigger happy."

"says the person who stood at 4th and High's intersection yesterday waiting for wild chuds to come up through the manhole and ended up leaving twelve corpses lying on the pavement, Sofia," Amato replied with a smile.

"well, I was recognized by FCPD for my chud control excellence, and this comin' from the guy who went into a place full of Chomoninja raiders two days back and came out of an empty place full of nothin' but dead corpses," the owner of the voice, Sofia, laughed.

"Is there any other kind of corpse?" Amato asked.

"Yeah," Sofia answered, "us, ya silly zombie. now Before ya go tryin' to kill her, let's find out who she is."

"You think she may be one of us?" Amato asked.

"Ya see her goin' after anyone?" Sofia asked.

"Uh, no," Amato admitted.

"Then she's likely one of us," Sofia returned.

Kristen looked in the direction of the voices and saw a tall man whose skin appeared to be both pale and pealing a bit. He had the hollow eyed look she associated with a zombie, but an intelligence that mirrored her own. He was wearing chudskin armor, had an American180 rifle slung at his back, a kidney cooler slung at his side, and a trail pack on his back. The person beside him was a young woman who stood at about five feet tall, whose skin had originally been dark (which meant that she was most likely African/American in descent), but which was now a bit on the pale side, not as pale as the man's, but enough to make her look either like a zombie, or as if she'd spent a great deal of time away from direct sunlight. Her gray eyes shared the same hollow look as his, her dark hair flowed down her back nearly to her waste, but was partially covered by a ninja head scarf. Her hands, like the man's, ended in ragged claw-like nails. everything Kristen saw told her that these two were zombies, but zombies who had, like her, retained their intelligence. She wondered for a moment how that was possible, but decided that that didn't matter at the moment. At that particular moment, she was more interested in what exactly the woman, Sofia, had been talking about when she'd mentioned a plinker, as she hadn't seen Amato aiming his rifle at her Before.

"So who are ya?" Sofia asked, as Kristen approached.

"Well, I'm Kristen. I just became a zombie, but I'm not interested in going after anybody, unless they attack me first of course. I'm not going to just take anyone going down the street toward Any Port or headed to what they call a park over there."

"So you're just like us," Amato said. "If you don't mind my asking, how'd you get to be this way? I thought our kind were rare."

"Why don't we have this conversation in any Port?" Sofia asked, "I don't like the idea of us talkin' round those damn monkeys. I know they're just animals, but they kinda creep me out."

As Amato and Sofia began moving down the street, Kristen told them of the events that had transpired in the orphanage, and how Alvin had thrown her into the Bradbury basement, followed by the conversation with her deceased mom. It still felt dreamlike to her, but she knew thanks to her first look into the grimy mirror in the bar once they entered it that she must be a zombie now. Her eyes had that distant, hollow look, but they still carried a measure of the intelligence she'd had Before. She felt just a bit slower than she had Before, but that was a minor problem compared to what the situation could have been if she'd not contracted zombie rot and retained her mind, memories, and most of her intellect.

"Well, that's quite an interesting story, dear," said Sofia. "It happened somewhat the same for me. Except that I didn't have a mama tellin' me all about the stuff that might just happen soon, and did. Ya see, it happened because Alvin was playin' hanky panky with my little sister in the orphanage, and I got pissed at him and started tryin' to fuck his ass up. I was sortta in a frenzy even then, with a load of adrenaline pumpin' through my veins. He just picked me up, like a sack of potatoes and just winged me into the basement. I ran for a bit, makin' it to a stairway I thought would get me outta there, but ended up down in some kinda mass grave. At least there were a load of old caskets and corpses there. Then a couple of zombies jumped me, and it was curtains. I come to, still conscious, but feelin' all slow and cold and such. but I guess the reason I'm not walkin' the streets, just splatterin' anyone who happens to walk by is because that adrenaline was there when I kicked the can. Ya think?"

"that's kind of what I've been thinking." said Amato, "I thought I was safe in the bradbury basement hiding from Sister Agnes and Alvin, but a load of zombies came after me too, and I finished up becoming one of them. I'm glad you were down there too, but to this day I have no clue what you were doing down there."

"You and I ended up goin' zombie at around the same time," Sofia replied, "that's why neither of us had any heads."

"It all makes sense," Amato said, "and you'll need some fresh brains soon too, Kristen, but first thing's first. You're going to need to ditch that orphanage garb. First of all, I'll teach you how to deliver packages for Fat ratzo but you're going to need some armor." He left the bar, returned in less than five minutes, produced a chudskin jacket and pants, combat boots and a leather beret from his trail pack and handed them to Kristen.

"thanks. I'll pay you back when I've gotten a little more established," Kristen said, and meant it.

"Oh, and that Dukes of Hazard ashtray, what kind of weapon is that for a zombie to be carryin' around. Hang on. I've got just the thing. Be right back," said Sofia, slinging her kidney cooler over her shoulder and taking her leave, making her way up the stairs.

Very shortly, Kristen could hear a helicopter of some sort taking off in the distance, but after a while Sofia was back.

"I just been to blastarm's in the crater rim. got you an M100. that'll be good for now. You've got a bit of learnin' to do Before ya be gettin' a piece like Amato's got," Sofia said, handing Kristen the gun she'd been removing from her trail pack whilst she'd been speaking, "but I'll be gettin' in touch with someone I know to make ya one like it and you'll likely have it Before the day's out."

Kristen took a moment to admire the finely crafted rifle that was slung over Amato's back. It was built like one of those machine guns they'd used during the gang wars of a couple centuries back that some referred to as a Tommy gun. It was short and squat with a large front sight and vertical foregrip that made for easy shooting from the hip. The flat pancake magazine it used mounted on the top of the receiver. This design represented, according to the gun dealers who routinely sold such weapons, a different thinking in machine guns... shooting a lot of small-caliber ammo very fast. Kristen thought that a person well versed in the use of rifles could suppress someone handily with such a weapon. It looked home made. no company's emblem was engraved into the stock or the barrel, but the fact that it was homemade didn't detract from its durability. whoever made those things sure knew what they were doing, Kristen decided.

"Here's yours," Sofia continued, "it takes six millimeter clips, which ya can get from Ammu Nation, and there's a nice little automat outside ya can get the ammo from when the shop's closed up."

The m100 was a short snub-nosed hunting rifle, and Kristen knew simply by looking at it that it had been rechambered to fit a 6mm clip. Sofia hadn't needed to tell her what type of ammunition the gun took, but Kristen wouldn't say such a thing, given the look on Sofia's face which said that she felt, possibly for one of the first times in her life, that she was being a help to someone. Kristen's father hadn't been able to teach her all he'd known about guns, because the collapse had happened, and he had died in its wake, along with her two older brothers, but she did know that much. Whoever had seen to its maintenance had done a satisfactory job, but she knew she'd have to learn how to repair it if it started to develop an erratic firing pattern, that is if it possessed a rapid fire mode.

"Ya won't be able to machine gun anyone with this," Sofia said, "but it hits hard. It doesn't have much of a kick either, unlike the 10/22, which I didn't get cause of its recoil. That's the kinda problem ya don't need in a fight, especially if ya never used a plinker Before."

"Uh, what the fuck's a plinker?" Kristen said with a smile.

"That's a Sofia expression," Amato said, smiling in his own turn, "she's got some interesting slang and it's pretty endearing once you've spent a few minutes around her."

Before Amato could say anything else, Kristen began sliding off the bar stool she'd been sitting on. Before he could move to support her, Sofia had stood with a speed Kristen would never have suspected in her, opened her kidney cooler, and removed a severed head.

"Feed," she said simply, handing the head to Kristen, "just never mind care dog. we don't usually feed in front of livin' people, but this is an emergency. If ya don't feed, you'll die in here, and care dog doesn't like corpses litterin' up his bar."

Kristen wondered for a moment how she was going to get the brains she hungered for out of the head, but then a sort of instinct took over and she leaned forward and cracked the head against the edge of the bar like an over-sized egg. This she did three or four times, applying more force each time, and the skull cracked, allowing her access to what was inside. Amato and Sofia stood, moved to stand between Kristen and care dog, so he'd not have a direct view of Kristen as she fed.

As she finished feeding, Kristen covered her mouth to stifle a burp that would have been extremely loud, not to mention extremely nasty, if she'd not done so, and began looking for a way to get rid of the now empty skull. Amato reached for it, and dropped it into the trash bag he'd slung at his side.

"I'd say grab one of those too, or more than one," he said, "oh, and I've got something else for you too. You'll need this stuff."

Amato produced a trail pack like the ones he and Sofia were wearing, and aided Kristen in securing it around her back, adjusting the straps to fit her exactly. He unzipped the various compartments, pointing out items located within.

"Jiffy-time water condenser," he said, pointing first into the trail pack and then the condenser he himself wore, "cups for said piece of equipment," he continued, "clips for your gun, uh, excuse me, plinker, a towel, grappling hooks and climbing ropes, various medical supplies, oh, and this."

He reached beneath the bar and brought out a kidney cooler identical to those worn by him and Sofia.

"How'd you get this stuff?" Kristen asked, "I didn't see you leave the bar."

"I didn't," Amato replied, "but I saw Sofia put it all under the bar when she came back in."

As Amato shifted his position a bit, he noticed a chud entering the bar, but not one of the animalistic ones. this one had long red hair which fell in a flowing curtain almost to her waste, stood at almost six feet tall, and was wearing a full set of clothes, including a ninja head scarf, and sported a pair of dark glasses over her eyes. after a moment, Amato recognized the chud for who she was.

"Hey Christini, how's it going?"

"It goes pretty well," Christini responded, "and I see that Alvin's latest victim didn't exactly turn out the way he wanted her to."

"No she didn't," responded Sofia, "thankfully. I'm hopin' that some day, someone'll hand that guy's ass to him on a silver platter."

"I personally would like to take a healthy chunk out of him," Christini contributed, "and I don't usually say things like that."

"You don't wanna take a chunk outta that fuck," Sofia said, "ya never know what'd happen if ya did."

"Uh, true," Amato said, "I doubt even wild chuds would go near any meat that'd come off that asshole."

"So, what are the two of you up to?" Christini inquired.

"Just about to start givin' Kristen here some pointers," Sofia replied, "but we may be able to hang with ya a bit later."

Sofia smiled as Christini hugged both her and then Amato, exited the bar, and made her way toward the 4th and High intersection, where she could return to the sewer tunnels.

Christini descended into the sewers beneath Freedom City through the open manhole at 4th and High, stood still for a moment, letting the stress induced by being above-ground melt from her, and took careful note of her surroundings. The tunnel she found herself in was huge and composed of crumbling concrete. There had been an extension of the tunnel south of the 4th and High manhole, but it had collapsed long ago, leaving only two ways to go, northward, beneath Freedom city proper, and east, to an area that roughly corresponded to underneath the burned out area south of the orphanage. Christini didn't want to go north, for gators of various sizes had taken that portion of the sewer system for their home and had a nasty habit of trying to take chunks out of anyone, chud or otherwise, who had the bad luck to finish up running across them. she wondered for a moment why Alvin used the bradbury's basement to dispose of trouble kids when the gator-infested sewers below the Freedom City Police department and the building whose sign declared it to be "Citihall" could have served his purposes far more effectively, but she was glad he hadn't thought of that particular solution to his and the Sister's problems.

After glancing around herself for a moment, she began navigating through the tunnels, utilizing her hypersensitive eyes and her enhanced sense of smell to good advantage. Ankle-deep sludge flowed through the tunnel she was following, whilst a trickle of dirty water flowed from a smaller opening in the south wall, an opening Christini entered after a few minutes of following the original tunnel, as she didn't want to finish up in a confrontation with sewer beetles, insects that had mutated to monstrous proportions thanks to the same combination of toxic chemicals and radiation which had been responsible for the mutation of the original sewer-dwellers who had utilized the tunnels as makeshift bomb shelters into the first chuds. The tunnel she now found herself in was almost too narrow to navigate in without getting stuck, but she'd used this rout to return to her home dozens, if not hundreds, of times, and she knew every inch of it like the back of her hand.

The tunnel eventually opened up into what she referred to as the bloodlight curve, thanks to reddish crystals embedded in the walls. these crystals gave off a dim glow, which made it look as if the walls themselves were bleeding glowing crimson. The tunnel opened, after a dozen or so steps, into a chamber illuminated by even more of the crystals, forming the nexus of a ruby monochrome kaleidoscope of reflective rock, a real wonder of geology. The dim reflections from the walls were broken in a thousand dappled beams across Christini's clothes and the duller rock floor. The floor in question sloped toward the center into a narrow iron grating, which Christini approached, after first making certain that no chobos were lying in wait for her down below.

The area immediately below the grating had been someone's bomb shelter back Before X-Day, but judging from the scattered human bones, Christini didn't think it did them a lot of good. The side she'd entered was a ripped mass of twisted, blackened steel plate, the other walls were riveted metal. Huge claw marks gouged through the floor toward a crack that led down into darkness. Opposite the grating, a narrow crack led further south, and this was the path christini chose. The walls of this narrow gash pressed up against her face, showing her bare rock split by the odd pipe and root. She could hardly breathe, let alone turn around. She shoved herself through, into a damp pipe, sighing with relief as she was once more able to breathe. The sound of water became more insistent this far in. Brown plant tendrils squirmed up from the cracked cement in knots and tangles of menacing flora. Not wasting any time, Christini vacated that area, not wanting to discover whether or not the plants or whatever they were were carnivorous. If someone wanted to find that out, it sure wasn't going to be her.

She moved toward a circle of daylight, which caused her eyes to squint involuntarily, and hurried past it as quickly as she could, eventually squeezing through a jagged hole in one of the tunnel walls, utilizing her body's natural ability to contort itself in ways no unmutated human could have managed, finding herself in an area she knew as the "chuds' graveyard", the ruins of a dry sewage holding tank. Christini wasn't sure what significance her more animalistic cousins attached to it, but they'd cleared a space in the ruins for a huge bone pile, with a few fresher chud corpses thrown on top. A broad brick arch gave access to what she privately referred to as the "chuds' highway, a set of almost perfectly intact, if disused, tunnels, the floors of which had been worn away into rough grooves by years, if not decades, of chud foot traffic. She moved along the chuds' highway until she reached a dead end, glanced about, looked down a deep shaft at her feet, decided that she didn't want to chance the device Frances Davison, whose ideas she usually tried out almost immediately, had set up here to make descending the shaft easier, and began descending on handholds until she had made it about half way down, where she stopped to rest, clinging to one of the handholds above her, as the ledge she was standing on was barely large enough to hold her. After a moment, she descended the rest of the way, finding herself standing on a large pile of refuse that someone, probably another intelligent chud, had placed at the bottom of the shaft in an attempt to minimize injuries sustained in possible falls. Christini had no idea why anyone would have thought such a thing would work, as the shaft was over a hundred and fifty feet deep, and anyone who fell that far would most likely finish up either dead or so badly injured that they wouldn't be getting up and walking again any time soon.

She descended a rusty ladder that had been ripped out of the side of an ascending shaft to a manhole, and into a rocky tunnel whose walls were a bizarre mix of concrete and natural rock. Through this she moved, finding herself in a large, open-air cavern she referred to as "the Hive", carved directly from the concrete sewer walls. Hundreds of tiny pocket-caves were carved into the surrounding walls, though none were reachable directly from the cavern floor. The air was filled with the pungent aroma of urine and blood, though Christini had no idea where the blood smell came from. Chuds, even the animalistic ones, never killed near their homes. A series of rusty, taped-together iron ladders leaning against one wall led up to a wooden walkway high above, from which the pocket caverns, which were referred to among the small population of intelligent chuds as "chudhives", could be accessed.

Christini ascended one of the ladders, being sure to pick the one that wobbled least, as she had no intension of finishing up having to crawl on broken legs to a sewer outlet and thus to saint God's Memorial Hospital. She stepped off the ladder onto a rickety wooden walkway encircling the cavern from which many of the caves were easily accessible, reached forward to a door set into the wall which was unlike the other makeshift ones surrounding it, pressed her palm to a Voxguard lock that had recently been installed, whereupon the door opened, granting her access. .

Although this place started out as just another chud cavern, Christini, Frances Davison, and Raelyn Lockwood had almost completely transformed it. The main area of the cavern had been expanded, the ceiling had been raised, and the cement walls had been smoothed over and covered over by wallpaper purchased from some above-ground shop or other. The floor had also been smoothed over, and the original makeshift entrance door had been replaced by a more conventional one. An air mattress had been placed in one corner, opposite a CRT television which was currently tuned to the channel broadcasting from the any Port bar. A reef tank containing a large number of fish of various kinds stood on a wrought iron stand, a kitchen stove and refrigerator were placed along another wall, marking that area as a cooking area. A wooden wardrobe stood against the final wall, on which was mounted a long weapon rack and another device that appeared to be a display rack of sorts, below which was placed a sewing machine, the Singer logo half broken off it.

Christini took a seat on the air mattress for a moment, fished in her bag for a pack of cigarettes, lit one, and smoked in silence for a while. it wouldn't be long Before she'd have to go back into the hated light of "above", but Frances was there, as was Raelyn Lockwood, and she'd decided long ago that she'd brave anything for Raelyn, even the light. Raelyn had, after all, been the one to teach her that regardless of her outward appearance, she possessed inner beauty. Raelyn had been her first, and only, sexual partner. Others could whore themselves to the ones Amato and Sofia called number people if they wanted, but she never would. Too many chances to finish up with a sexually transmitted disease doing that. And with Saint God's being the only hospital in town, and no one there having any clue how to treat such things as the clap, she, and many others, had made the decision to stay clear.

After an hour or so of relaxing in her chudhive, Christini once again set out into the sewer tunnels, eventually ascending into the world above near the apartment complex in Freedom city where Frances made one of his homes. It was almost time to get some actual work done, and Frances usually was the one to fly her and raelyn to various places where said jobs were located. If she didn't find him in his freedom city apartment, she would utilize the chud tunnels to leave Freedom city and make her way to weezer Village, where he also kept an apartment, not that he'd be keeping either above-ground apartment for much longer. He'd spent enough time in the sewers, repairing water valves and power transformers, not to mention simply exploring the area, that he was beginning to undergo the change that would finish up with him being just as "chuddy", as he called it, as she herself was. the claws had recently sprouted from the ends of his fingers, and his skin was beginning to darken. It most likely wouldn't be very long now Before the light would begin causing him stress, not to mention outright pain.

Christini was glad that Weezer had a direct chud root, as she called the tunnels she and her kind had dug from the sewers to other areas, leading to it, as Frances would need to utilize said roots when his change completed itself. Being one of the few citizens with a grasp of science and a general knowledge of how things worked, his skills were in demand in weezer, which didn't sport very many skilled people of its own, apart from the highbrows who usually hung around the only remaining working scientific establishments. Those ones couldn't be bothered to lower themselves to the point where they'd be caught dead fixing the pipes in the steam pipe network that kept the village warm or repairing the hydro-electric equipment at the dam east of the village proper. They simply took for granted the continued functioning of the steam pipe network and the turbines that generated power for the village. If not for people like Frances, they, and everyone else in the village, would likely have frozen to death long ago.

Christini made her way into the Helliday Inn, the name probably being someone's idea of a joke, and up to the third floor. After spending nearly an hour with raelyn, she knocked on the door of apartment 315, received no answer, and quickly returned to the sewers. Since Frances wasn't in the Helliday, it was time for christini to head to Weezer.

After a couple of minutes had passed following Christini's departure, Amato stood up again, and said, "first of all, a very simple job. Delivering packages. I'll introduce you to Fat Ratzo. You can then start delivering packages for him. this will give you an opportunity to learn Freedom City and surrounding areas better. I don't imagine you got much of a chance in the orphanage."

"No. I really didn't. We'd go on walks rather seldom, and the sister would only take us where she wanted to take us," Kristen rejoined, "You know she wanted to keep us in the dark because we only got to take these walks at night."

"Oh, and there's another job that we're gonna teach ya," said Sofia a bit gravely, "but sometimes yall gotta have nerves of steel to do it. Ya gotta eliminate the sick orphans in the orphanage Before they go spreading the mutated form of rabies they've got. And mind ya, only the sick ones. I'm sure ya don't want to be like these fat bastards that crawl in there regularly and that go splattin' any of them that happen to walk down the stairs at ya."

"Exactly. I was one of them, and I've seen those sick ones, but Sister Agnes told me they were contagious."

"And they can spread it round to all the healthy ones that are there and we don't want that," Sofia said, hugging Kristen. "Well, let's go. we've got lots to do."

She started first delivering packages for Fat Ratzo, going up to the Any Port Lounge, with its once-fashionable decor and its dilapidated but comfortable furnishings. Amato would give pointers on the easiest way to get to the roof of the burned out building in Gangland where ghost Dog hung out, the abandoned apartment complex where a guy named Chester stayed, and of course the lobby of the Bradbury where Roy Poorman ran interference against any scumbag who dared pass through the place. After getting a few pointers, Kristen started to pick things up on her own. Soon, however, she was informed by Fat Ratzo that she had finished the job for the day and she could go.

Then Sofia brought Kristen to Ammu Nation, where the amiable proprietor taught her about rifles. Walter commented about her great hand-eye coordination when she was shooting at the target with her new m100. Sure she bombed quite a few times, but Walter chocked it up to experience, which he said would come with "going out and killing shit." Of course the FCPD cam told him that once again he had violated the verbal morality statute and he told it to screw off.

During the afternoon and early part of the evening, Kristen continued to brush up on her rifles skills, getting two bull's eyes in a row. Walter pronounced that she was ready for practical experienced but warned her not to go after anything too hard just yet.

"Now come back and I'll teach you more once you have more experience," Walter said, and Kristen got some more 6 millimeter clips from both automats, remembering her father's words, "You can't have enough ammo."

Sofia decided they should leave off doing any serious work for the rest of the day and relax. So, since Kristen didn't have a place of her own just yet, Amato and Sofia invited her to come up to their apartment and camp out there. It was a good thing too, Kristen thought. She sure didn't have any designs on spending time at the Crash Landing, or as some people called it, Cube Hotel, which was free housing for Freedom Citizens, and wake up to find all of her shit gone.

Amato and Sofia led her through the dump that was the lobby, and up the stairs. The rain had soaked through the high ceiling completely, making the floor into a slick, greenish mess of pulped carpet and mold. Sometimes, when one stepped on it, a cloud of grayish spores shot up and coated their legs. As they walked across the floor, empty crack vials and rusty hypodermic needles crunched under their feet. At least Kristen thought that's what they were, they were covered in a thick layer of dust and dirt. Occasionally she could make out stains and rotten clothing on the floor. Whoever used to take drugs here stopped doing so a long time ago, though. At some point, a large firefight must have happened there. Large chunks of concrete and plaster were torn out of the walls, floor and ceiling, and the remains of the carpet and wallpaper were flecked with blood and blasted with soot and ashes. The view didn't improve as they continued up the stairs and through the building either. Rainwater had eaten away most of the plaster on the walls and ceiling, exposing either wooden slats or steel girders. The floor was thick with crusty dried blobs of disintegrated wallboard. There were breaks in the usual scenery though, the first change taking place when they reached the third floor landing. The hallway here was dry, but most of the carpeting had rotted away long ago, leaving an exposed concrete floor. Graffiti covered every inch of exposed surface, even the floor. Huge cracks had formed in the northern wall and the floor, filled with dust and tiny chunks of cement. A thick coating of dust covered the floor above, except for a well-worn path in the center. All of the debris from that path had been kicked over to the wall to the south or the balcony grating. As they reached the fifth floor, Kristen noticed something else that told her that she was fortunate to now be a zombie and in the company of two other zombies who were packing some serious firepower. Some time ago, some lunatic had taken a bunch of mannequins, painted them blue and stuck them up on the walls and even on some of the doors. They were dressed in rags and were arranged in strange poses. Someone, probably the same one who had hung them up in the first place, had shot all of them in the forehead, leaving dime sized holes. The ubiquitous rain damage in the building seemed to have spared the fifth and sixth floors, as most of the plaster and concrete were intact. Some enterprising artist had recently taken advantage of that fact by spraypainting a massive and ornate image of an oriental-style dragon along the wall, incorporating all the apartment doors into their labor. The claws of the dragon held lightning bolts, and mushroom clouds were coming out of its nose. Someone had apparently tried to clean the sixth floor hallway up a few years back. Plastic drop cloths were affixed to the walls and floors, and the beginnings of a fresh coat of paint could be seen in one corner. But a huge hole in one of the walls which gave off the smell of death had most likely scared them off. The same person had tried to shore up the holes in the ceiling and floor. There were moldering piles of lumber, rusted out tools and rain-damaged pots of hardened plaster everywhere. Something stopped the construction, however, and the hallway was still in dangerous, rotting condition.

They left the horrid conditions of the hallway behind when they entered Amato and Sofia's apartment. After brushing herself down to get rid of the worst of the dust, Kristen mentioned that she was hungry, so Amato opened his small fridge and brought out a head. Once again, the instinct was there to guide her, and she eagerly gobbled up the brain matter inside, feeling more and more revitalized.

As Amato directed her attention to the garbage chute, through which she threw the empty skull, she noticed that the small television was turned on and tuned to FNN, the freedom city News Network. Every now and again, a new story would come across the airwaves, but mostly the news ran in a repeating loop. as Kristen looked away from the screen, the upcoming headline caught her eye.

"Special report up next: is the Gein Foundation the right place for my unwanted children?"

"there's that fuckin' story again," Sofia said in a low, somewhat dangerous tone of voice, 'and that word "unwanted". what the hell ...?"

"That's weiland-Utani's way of saying cloning's the only way to go," Amato said as he placed a few odds and ends into the large cabinet in one corner of the main room, "regardless of how more and more babies are livebirths these days and fewer of them are dying after a few hours or days of life, WU wants to keep cloning as the only possible method of keeping humanity on earth."

"I wonder why ya have the TV tuned to that crap anyway," Sofia said, "unless someone does something really spectacular, it's mostly Weiland-Utani bullshit."

"Better that than the alternatives," Amato said, putting an arm around Sofia, "I mean, I don't really feel like watching the live holocam feed from the Hellfire club. And who wants to tune into the camera feed from any Port?"

"There's a television feed from any Port?" Kristen asked.

"Yeah," Sofia replied, "some dumb jackass hacked the FCPD cam in there and started broadcastin' the feed."

"why?" Kristen inquired.

"From what I gather," Amato answered, "so they could keep track of targets. they'd see their potential victim go into Any Port and follow them and try to kill them. They only tried it inside the bar itself once. Luckily for them, they were faster than care dog, or they'd have had their heads smashed to pulp in the door of the freezer in there. I saw him do that to someone once and I'm thankful that I've never pissed him off, at least not yet."

"I doubt ya have it in ya to piss him off," Sofia said with a smile as she fished in her trail pack for a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. as she prepared to light up, Amato patted a spot on the air mattress that served as a combination set of chairs, couch, and bed, and handed her an ash tray.

"Does he actually do that to people who piss him off?" Kristen asked.

"Only if they start shit that could get killin' type ugly," Sofia replied, "if ya decide ya wanna pee on the floor in there like an asshole does it, he'll chuck ya out. If ya decide ya just can't wait to start feelin' someone up, he squirts ya with soda. I think that's just his way of jokin' around though. But go in there with an explosive belt on or with a plinker aimed at someone, and he'll feed ya your ass on a platter."

Soon afterwards, Sofia, Amato and Kristen all decided that it was time to get a good night's sleep, which resulted in a rather interesting situation. Kristen wasn't sure whether it was in the brains that she'd eaten from that last head or what the cause was, but she had the strangest dream. She dreamed that she was in a vacant lot near her pre-collapse home. the place had been just a small sandlot between buildings that she and her friends had liked to play in. Around the worn and slightly lopsided baseball diamond the grass had grown fairly high, and had occasionally hidden a prickly weed or crushed beer can. Still, it'd been a place the grownups had rarely bothered coming, and that had made it a place that belonged to her and her friends. The long shadows of evening were cutting across the scene. The lot was open on the east side to the street. An alley between two buildings cut from the vacant lot up towards the railroad tracks. The gravel crunched under her sneakers as she padded along between the brick buildings and overgrown bushes. This was the sort of place one might expect to encounter a bully or two, but today she knew her luck was just too good. She reversed course after walking a few steps into the alley, and continued out of the lot. she exited the lot and found herself on the sidewalk which gave on Fourth Avenue as it had been before the collapse, standing directly outside her childhood home, even though the lot and her home had, in reality, been nearly a mile distant from each other. A sudden feeling of peace filled Kristen. She couldn't have been happier. Ice cream money jingled in the pocket of her jeans as she wandered the warm sidewalk, hopping the small cracks. A few birds sortied across the deep blue sky, chirping merrily. An orange cat curled in a nearby flowerbox watched them idly before rolling half over and sunning its striped belly. A cool breeze picked up, carrying the scent of freshly cut lawns.

She ascended the front steps of her former home, crossed the deck, and opened the door leading inside. Sun-warmed hardwood creaked under her sneakered feet as she crossed the living room of her house, a building which had, in reality, long ago been replaced by Salvage Unlimited. Everything around her seemed to have an odd fuzzy patina, like a half remembered day at the beach. The pictures on the mantle, the trophies and books on the hutch, the dark oil stained painting and smooth-grained furniture ... all shone in the rising light. From a hidden kitchen wafted the scent of baking chocolate chip cookies. She moved to a staircase that led up from the living room, ascended, and found herself in her old room, a place that had offered both safety and childhood nightmares of monsters in the closet.

Her room lay off the main staircase. Wallpaper depicting late 19th century automobiles covered one wall, where utilitarian Model Ts floated among graceful Packard's and Jet-9s. A mobile of little biplanes hung from the white ceiling, stirring in the faint breeze. Overall, it was a "heck of a mess", as her Dad constantly used to tell her. A beaten-up wooden toy chest stood against one of the walls. Her dad had made it for her when she'd been just a little kid, shortly after her Mother had remarried.

She left her room, descended the stairs, and left the house, finding herself once more on the sidewalk, which she followed in the opposite direction from the downtown area. The sidewalk and adjacent road ran back into a quiet dead end against the back of a nearby warehouse. Grass spread up through cracks in the pavement and a few broken bottles glittered here and there. The area was quiet and surprisingly peaceful. Life seemed to slow there by the river. The placid water drifted by over the large stones cluttering the riverbed. The sun was warm on her face as she paused to take in the blowing reeds and the occasional splash of a frog. If she'd had a newspaper, she thought, she could have made a boat.

Suddenly, the sky began to darken, even though she knew that sunset was still nearly an hour away. Her skin suddenly prickled, giving her a feeling of extreme unease. It was as if the air had suddenly become electric. Background noise seemed to fade, as far away, a siren began to wail. she remembered what they'd taught her in school about that siren. She needed to grab her stuff and get to a shelter, and fast. She reversed course, passed her house, and found herself on the corner of Fourth and High as it had been. The street ran into a large intersection which seemed to have not changed much in its structure regardless of the collapse, apart from the fact that the version she was seeing now was a lot cleaner, devoid of the dirt and grime of post-collapse society. On the corner stood a bright red fire hydrant with a beagle on a leash tied to it. Long rows of storefronts hawked their wares through the plate glass of their windows, while large display stands of fruits wafted tantalizing odors into the air. She ran further north along Fourth, remembering even as she did that this was partially how she had found herself in the bomb shelter beneath the library on the day everything had changed forever. In reality, she had come from the opposite direction, from her school, which had long ago been replaced by the southern-most area of the Burbclave. Fourth Avenue ran up into a small wooded lane, surrounded by neat homes and a park with a set of swings, and overlooked by the library, a building that had been replaced by a makeshift nursing home.

The public library was just as Kristen remembered it, quiet and somewhat musty. Long rows of encyclopedias and periodicals stood in cheap wooden cases. A few large wooden stands held the precious Dewy Decimal repository for all to use. In one corner near the reading room were a few cylindrical metal stands full of Popular Science magazines. Their glossy covers proclaimed the latest in technological advances: washing machines, hand-held radios, even personal hovercraft. The future had been shaping up nicely before the final war had reshaped the world forever. She ran through the library, opened the door to the basement, ran down the stairs two at a time, and crouched down, waiting for the end she knew would soon come.

The basement of the library had been hurriedly converted into a Civil Fallout Shelter. Shelves full of un circulated books and old magazines had been pushed into the corner to make way for a few wooden tables, a large wireless radio, and a big pile of government supplies. A quick scan of the stenciled designations on the boxes revealed that she was in the presence of 1500 pounds of wadded beef, 25 gallons of corn nog, 150 emergency flares, and one industrial strength chemical toilet. Judging by the crushed nature of a few boxes and the presence of a pair of blue panties, the place also seemed to be a popular spot for heavy teenage petting. She felt a soft bassy rumbling deep in her hiding place. Terrified as she was, she didn't really know what exactly had happened. All she knew, as the case had been for her in actuality, was that she'd survived, and that nothing was going to be the same again ...

The first thing she noticed as her eyes refocused was the paint peeling off the clapboard ceiling. Her memories of the great Collapse were all fuzzy and vague... was it just a cruel dream? Pushing herself to her feet in a cloud of dust, she realized that it was better not to think about it. The past was gone, burned away. The present was a broken land lit by a radioactive sky, and for now, she must hide underground. But the future, such as it was, was hers.

As she looked around, she noticed the corner of a pamphlet sticking out from behind the corner of a cracked mirror. She reached forward, carefully removed the pamphlet, and carefully examined it. The pamphlet was a mottled brown and grey and was clearly old. Its once glossy finish was all that had kept it together so far. From what Kristen could make out, across the front a wholesome-looking family was climbing out of a small bank vault-like seal in the ground. A series of faded paragraphs read, "So you have decided to invest in a Bedrock IIa Family Shelter. The BEIIa will protect you and your loved ones in relative comfort through a 10 megaton resident* strike. Make sure to fully stock your BEIIa with the recommended allotment of meat and vegetables. You may also wish to invest in a Bedrock Lawgiver shotgun should communist elements be prevalent upon your return to the surface. When returning to the surface, make sure to follow the following survival tips: Always check your Bedrock Pathfinder Geiger counter when entering unfamiliar territory. Water supplies may be scarce or irradiated. Always carry water supplies and never trust to locating more while traveling. Deprivation may have rendered others predatory. Do not attract attention to yourself or your belongings. The key to survival will be establishing contact with local government. Make sure to report to the nearest rally point upon departure from your shelter. Good Luck! - Bedrock Shelter Inc., a Division of the Rand Corporation. *The BEIIa is rated Class II and will survive a localized strike within 1000 meters of zero."

Kristen and her family hadn't been lucky enough to come into possession of one of the advertised shelters, but she'd survived. As she looked around, she noticed that she was now in the bunker beneath the library basement. Ratty blankets and furry skins had been pasted on the concrete walls to provide meager insulation. More mats of furs were strewn across the floor. Many small bunks lined the walls, stacked four-high, to provide small comfort for whoever managed to get into them first. A cramped little half-room made out to look like a comfortable living room lay off at an angle from the entrance to the bunker. Unfortunately, even if it'd ever been comfortable at one point, its comfortable days had passed long before the place had been pressed into service. Dust covered every imaginable surface and all the furniture was broken. The room that passed for a kitchen had likewise seen better days. The walls and floors were covered in grime and most of the few remaining appliances had snipped power cords or other obvious defects. One of those old cooking droids from the "house of the future" commercials stood near one of the counters. Far from being the perfect robotic butler they were advertised as, they often defected and refused to do anything but play knife games. Beyond the kitchen, a mostly empty room with a rotting hardwood floor passed itself off as a recreation room. Some battered old gym equipment was scattered around, but most of it looked pretty useless. A tattered poster reading "PUMP IT TO THE LIMIT" hung on one of the walls. A narrow steel-walled corridor ran away from the bunker. Barricades blocked most of the tunnel, but there was a gap which allowed one to navigate the fallen debris. A nest of sparking wires hung from the ceiling, making Kristen thank whatever Gods there were that she wasn't any taller than she was. She moved along the corridor, eventually locating the exit shaft, ascended it, and suddenly found herself in Any Port, but it wasn't any Port. A sign over the bar's entrance read "All Port USA", and she somehow knew that the man behind the bar wasn't Care dog, but a care dog, whatever in hell's name one of those was, and there was no sign at all of veronica Moser. She climbed the stairs to the second floor lounge, only to find that the entire area was different. the man occupying the central area bore a t-shirt proclaiming him to be not fat ratzo, but rat fatzo. Kristen supposed that when you had buck teeth and whiskers as long as those sported by the fat ratzo not quite look-alike, there was no point in anyone referring to you as rat fatzo behind your back. the BJ9 was nowhere to be found, and the usual sound of the helicopters taking off and landing was absent. Curiously, Kristen mounted the stairs leading to the roof, only to find that the beacon and security turret were absent from the helipad. In fact, all that appeared to occupy the area usually reserved for one of the two publicly accessible helicopters was some sort of concrete cube.

after reversing direction, not having any notice taken of her by either Rat fatzo or the care dog, she found herself on a street that rather resembled 4th Avenue, but at the same time, one that was different in many ways. The lamp posts appeared to all be different heights, the differing structures possessing no rhyme or reason as to their sizes. The usual background chatter was different in a way Kristen couldn't' put her finger on, but this wasn't Freedom city, especially not with a restaurant baring a sign reading "The Famished frog" replacing the recycling center.

Deciding that she didn't want to know what a place with a name like that would sell, she turned away from it and made her way toward where she knew the bradbury to be.

Even there though, a change had taken place. Rather than the towering structure she knew, what confronted her was a building that had sunken mostly into the earth at some point in its history. The entryway she knew had been replaced by a large hole resembling the one she'd seen the previous day during her walk through the various ascending floors with Amato and Sofia. As she stepped through the gaping hole in the wall, a drop of thick brown water dropped on her head from the moldy ceiling. After getting over the grossness of that experience, she took a look around. She saw Before her a crumbling building resembling the bradbury in many ways, weakened by the weather and left damaged beyond repair for perhaps a century. Gaping holes could be seen in the roof above, and the apartments ran around the lobby on balconies with rusty railings and dirty floors. The carpeting, like most other surfaces, was congealed with water, dirt, and mold. A large paper sign reading "The Bradbury! Come get your discounted apartments today! Maximum security and comfort!" had been hung carelessly on the dirty wall. Along one wall was an automatic machine one could supposedly use to rent apartments, but it looked as if it hadn't seen use in months. The rusty stairwell led up, beside an dark, empty elevator shaft, teeming with insect and fungus life.

turning away from the Bradbury, Kristen walked toward where she knew the Galleria should have been, but found herself standing outside a rusty gate which hung from one hinge and apparently hadn't managed to keep anyone from passing beyond it in years. Kristen squeezed between the gate and one of the posts meant to secure it, and was almost immediately confronted by a little girl who eyed her for a moment Before saying, "Who are you! Get the fuck out of my yard!"

Beyond the area Kristen assumed to be a front yard lay a pasture, complete with horse, a pair of frog-like pet rocks lying on the ground, and a barn casting a shadow over the immediate area.

retracing her steps through the gate, past the All Port bar, and moving toward what she knew had to be the area containing the FCPD precinct, she found herself in an area such as she'd never Before seen in post-collapse freedom City. A sign over the intersection read Peach Lane", and beyond said sign were shops such as she had never seen Before. One was a jewelry store whose door bore the legend "Diamond Girl", in which the rings and necklaces were secured behind a variety of glass she'd never encountered Before. the shoppers were moving about as if they had absolutely nothing to fear, and it was apparent that none of them were wearing any type of armor, nor was there a weapon to be seen. She remembered, vaguely, what life had been like Before the collapse, and knew that this was a close approximation of life long Before the missiles had begun raining from the sky. The shop opposite Diamond Girl bore a sign which simply read "Computer Store", another shop bore a sign over its door reading "The Chocolate factory", the one opposite it bore one reading "Natures Beauty", and appeared to sell flowers of all sizes and colors. Still another bore a sign reading "Peaches and Cream lingerie and novelty shop", a restaurant on one corner bore the legend "Peaches Palace restaurant", and the final shop Kristen could see was identified as "Gangman Pet Store" and appeared to sell frog-shaped pet rocks.

at the far end of Peach Lane, a driveway intersected with the street, and this kristen followed until it ended at a spacious house that somewhat resembled the one she had lived in before the collapse. She retraced her steps and followed Peach Lane until it intersected with another street whose sign proclaimed it to be "sandy Lane'. Followed one way, Sandy Lane led to a seemingly endless stretch of beach, and followed the other, to an intersecting trail whose sign declared it to be "Blood Road".

Something in the air made Kristen feel uneasy as she turned onto Blood Road. There were so many trees on either side of the dirt trail that it was gloomy even during the day. There was a chill in the air that she couldn't explain, but which reminded her of being in the orphanage basement. A decaying palatial mansion cast its shadow over the road opposite a plot of land whose steel gate bore the legend "Evar After Cematary".

A huge brick wall surrounded the mansion, with only a gate showing inside of it. Mounted in gold on the gate were the letters MM, which appeared to be right in the middle of an insignia of some sort.

As Kristen moved toward the gate, the mansion vanished, as did the landscape of the strangely altered freedom city, and she found herself standing at the entrance to what appeared to be some sort of museum which seemed to be surrounded by a solid looking stone wall with a large arch crowning the gap Before her. At some point there had been two wrought iron doors under the arch, but now one was missing and the other lay in the dirt just outside the wall. The main path led up to the museum. She craned her neck up trying to fit the whole silhouette in her field of vision. It was a tall building devoid of windows and full of sharp angles, almost as if it was built by a fully deteriorated lunatic. A weather beaten old sign read "Stephen Jay Gould Memorial Museum! Opening Soon!" Although someone had scratched out most of "Soon" and scrawled "NEVER" underneath it. Kristen ascended the stairs and approached the entrance of the building. The two massive metal doors Before her appeared to be welded shut, causing her to turn about and begin looking for another way in. Beyond the blocked entry was what appeared to be a ruined garden consisting mainly of long dead plant life, ruined furniture, and the remains of a long dried pond, beyond which lay a large mound of dirt, in the exact center of which could be seen what appeared to be a metal door leading down into darkness.

The door groaned open slowly on rust-clogged hinges and kristen stepped down into a tunnel which was shrowded in complete darkness apart from the occasional flicker of light from the apparently worn out fixtures overhead. She followed the passage until it ended at a ladder leading up into a room whose door bore the legend "Curator's Office". A large oak desk sat at the head of the room, displaying an impressive amount of clutter. Papers and knick-knacks were stacked haphazardly, teetering in all directions. A filing cabinet that appeared to be too stuffed to be closed was, for some unknown reason, pushed up against a dusty looking stuffed beefalo.

Kristen knew at this point that what she was experiencing was quite definitely a dream. the museum's displays consisted of objects from both Before and after the collapse, including a stuffed beefalo, a pre-collapse kitchen stove, what appeared to be a penis of enormous size animated by a force Kristen didn't even want to think about, a perfect model of what appeared to be some form of airship, and several things that appeared to have come from deep beneath the sea.

She explored this area for a wile, and just as she was getting the hang of how to find her way to different areas, the scene Before her blinked as if she were inside a television show and the scene had just wiped to a new one, leaving her sitting beneath a kitchen sink of enormous size, in the company of several beings she could only classify as aliens of some sort or another. each of the beings wore some form of garment with a nametag stiched into it. From what Kristen could tell, the beings were named Rands, Deuce, Pants, and Spigot, and were engaged in animated conversation with one another.

"sir are you seriously hunting my wumpus?" Rands inquired.

"I'm raping your face too," Deuce replied.

"that was not a part of the syllabus," respondedRands, "I think diaper humor is going to skyrocket over the next few weeks."

"I'm with you, also buying dong/bong futures,"Pants contributed.

"Deuce, what did you get me for my birthday?" Spigot asked.

"For your birthday I have gotten you: nothing," replied Deuce, "which is actually a positive thing, since usually I get you: a punch to the tits, and by that I mean assault and battery on your girlfriend."

"Honking it," was Spigot's apparently unconnected response.

Deuce, apparently ignoring the previous comment, suddenly exclaimed, "Hgaluhuglahgag!"

"I hear that," contributed Pants, "can you love me?"

Rands, apparently tracking the conversation, such as it was, responded with "I can."

"It's "may you love me", and the answer is "pain"," Deuce replied, giving all concerned a whithering look.

"Most excellent," Pants said, apparently not tracking the conversation as well as his fellows, or perhaps Kristen was the one not tracking the discourse.

Without warning, Spigot rose to his tiptoes, nearly slamming his head off the bottom of the gigantic sink which formed the ceiling of this odd room, and cried, "A one, and a two, and a, cocks! Cocks! Cocks! Cocks! Cocks! Funny!"

"One if by land and two if by face," Rands deadpanned.

"They usually arrive by now," returned Spigot.

"Okay, that's it! Everybody out of the rape pool!" Deuce exclaimed.

Kristen pushed at the over-sized cabinet door before her, not wanting to hear any more idiocy from the four beings beneath the sink, and finished up on what appeared to be the surface of some sort of alien world. this scene didn't last long, but transitioned immediately to one which seemed a bit more familiar to Kristen. a ruined building that appeared to be a combination apartment building and office block. She could barely move for trash .. shards of glass gleamed spitefully in the dimmed light of the dirty bulb that dangled above. The solid wooden doors in front of her were tightly closed, each bearing a solid, dull grey lock and chain. As she moved through the corridor, shattered bottles and plastic bags full of trash choked the hallway. The smell of the collected rubbish, which she had noticed upon first blinking to this area was even worse, bitterly assaulting her nostrils. The carpet in the stairwell at the end of the corridor was stained and gave off a strong scent of urine. Kristen could see the rickety old staircase stretching itself tiredly toward the next floor. The rusty steps didn't look in particularly good condition, but she was fairly sure they would hold her weight, that was if she didn't do anything stupid, such as stomping on them. The hallway she found on the floor above seemed bigger than the first, although that may have been due to the fact the rubbish wasn't knee deep. The smell of must and mildew still hung in the air, and Kristen found herself having to squint through the poorly lit shadows to be able to make out even basic shapes. She explored the area for a few minutes after getting her bearings, but had only gotten as far as the third floor before her location changed again.

This time, she found herself standing on an endless plain of tall grass. Rough wind washed across her, chilling her ears. A small cartoonish house sat in the middle of the plain, crude chimney askew. Upon entering the house, Kristen discovered that it was an exact copy of the one she had passed on Peach Lane. It smelled of mothballs and vegetable soup. It was just like when she'd been a kid, before her biological Father had left the family and gone no one knew where. And speaking of her father, he stood in the center of the living room, glaring at her.

"Where are my glasses? Did you run over my glasses with that bike? Did you? he inquired, as if continuing a conversation that had been started at some time now past, "Never gonna amount to anything, are you. "They'll be here soon. I'm sorry it had to come to this."

Kristen wondered for a moment what the man was talking about, but was awakened before she could figure much about this part of the dream out.

Needless to say, Kristen felt rather disoriented when she woke up, because it had felt like the dream was happening. She even asked Amato about it later when he and Sofia woke up.

"now that definitely couldn't be real. It was just so messed up. Yall just had a dream that seemed real," said Sofia, laughing.

"I Sincerely hope that doesn't happen. that would be strange," said Amato, also laughing. "Sofia, did you give her the head of a chobo or something?"

"No, I didn't give her the head of a chobo," said Sofia, mock-sternly, "Don't try and accuse me of givin' her the head of no chobo. Only the best for the new recruit, huh?"

"good thing," Amato said with a smile, "If one of us had, she'd be running around, waving a copper pipe, living in the sewers, and asking if anyone's got a sigret."

"Bite your tongue," Sofia said laughing.

"Aw what's wrong with sigrets?" Amato asked, the smile still on his face.

"Will yall kindly ...?" Sofia began, then burst out laughing.

Kristen looked toward the window and noticed that the first light of morning was creeping over Slagtown and freedom City. below, on the street, a monkey of some sort was climbing up the side of the apartment complex. Sofia also saw it and looked, for a moment, as if she'd simply open the window, aim her gun out of it and start shooting, but she apparently thought better of it and fished in her trail pack for a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

"See?" Amato said, apparently not done trying to make her laugh yet, "nothing wrong with sigrets at all."

Sofia threw her arms around him, buried her face in his chest, and howled with laughter.

As if on cue, an add came on the freedom City News Network featuring a chobo, sometimes referred to as a genius chud, one of the slightly mutated homeless people (not quite chud but not quite human) who had finished up living in the sewers. He was saying, "I use ta love tha sigrets you get at that medical store. Now I smoke Skewports, and they are tha best."

Right after that, the bubbly announcer said, "Yes, citizens, even a chobo knows that Skewports give you more nicotine and that cool fresh flavor that you've come to expect from more expensive brands. If you're feeling the letdown of cigarettes that have less nicotine, go with Skewports: More bang for your buck, so don't press your luck."

"That was way corny," said Sofia, "and Skewports are the best cig on the market. there's only those cut rate ones they sell at Meds For Less and Skewports, unless ya go to that upscale store in corpclave, so what are they talkin' about?"

"Okay, how did they pay the chobo to do that part of the ad?" asked Amato, "and what did they pay him? Chobos don't usually have credit chips. And did you notice that he spoke slightly better than your garden-variety Chobo out there in the sewers."

"Find another smart chobo who's willin' to give his head and Kristen won't be havin' funky dreams that send us into hysterics," Sofia said.

"Where'd the fun be in that?" Amato asked.

"I'll bet somethin' else will happen," Sofia answered, "somethin' always does around here."

as if to prove Sofia right, the FNN reporter appeared on the screen again and with no preamble what so ever said, "Beatrice Acres is under attack from a swarm of politically conservative insects!"

"Politically conservative insects?" Kristen asked, "what the hell?"

"I have no clue," Amato said, "furthermore, I have no idea where Beatrice Acres even is, let alone what it is."

"It's a farmin' community of a sort," Sofia answered, "they raise tuskers there, and they grow some crops, but nothin' real big. Nothin' like the village in the middle of adamant Canyon."

The story that accompanied the headline wasn't enlightening in the least, but all three of them listened intently to the advert that came on as the first in the next break.

"are you tired of the run of the mill programming brought to you by hacked FCPD cameras?" a youngish woman in a weiland-Utani uniform asked her audience, "sick of seeing only Hellfire, any Port, or Slagtown's stick fightin' pit? Then tune your TV to the games Network today! the games are the newest form of entertainment, featuring people just like you in high paying contests. And if you're tired of being poor, eating dog and rat meat, and living with no security or safety, you too can be a winner! we offer a variety of games of skill both in practical survival and knowledge. If you're the variety who wishes to test your brains as well as your physical capabilities, then try treadmill to Bucks! If you're one who goes more for purely physical contests, try Run For Your Guns! If water is more your thing, there's Swim the Crocodiles! And if you're brave enough and skilled enough, you can even enter one of our high stakes contests! There's a game for every taste, and millions of citizens like you can watch the contests from beginning to end on their very own televisions. If you want to take part in the games, come to the Network games building and sign up today! The Network games building can be located in the corpclave, directly across from the weiland-Utani tower. Sign up or tune in today!"

"What the ...?" Sofia began.

"Games," Amato mused, "what's that all about?"

"I haven't the slightest idea," Sofia replied, "and what the hell's fun Guns?"

"What the hell guns?" Amato asked.

"They had more titles scrollin' on the screen behind the voiceover," answered Sofia, "and one of them was fun Guns."

"Sounds to me like just another weird game," Kristen said, "but that answers the question of what that big construction project going on on Reagan and Ironside was in corpclave."

"Yeah," Sofia mused, "they can't give people like us better housin', but they can build a big ass tower in corpclave all for the purpose of some kind of whacked out games network."

"I may go check it out," Amato said.

"You would," Sofia said, "if it's new, you've just gotta poke into it and see just what it is and what it does and what it's all about. One of these days you're gonna get yourself beheaded on one of your little trips to see what somethin' is, and then you'll have to use Weiland-Utani's clonin' facilities and end up with one of them bar codes on your arm that basically says, "we're Weiland-Utani, and we own your ass."

"We've already got W-U bar codes on our arms," Amato returned, "if you recall, all of us now alive, or semi alive, or undead, or whatever, were originally around Before the missiles fell from the sky and the world turned to total and complete shit. W-U already cloned us all."

Amato sank into silence, remembering the days that now seemed so far away in time. The few childhood memories of the days Before the Collapse were just fragments of a pleasant dream. The last time life seemed worth living was about seventy years ago. The air raid sirens debuted a new tune that day, their falsetto doomsday song in perfect harmony with Amato's confused crying, as his father refused the neighbors entry into the fallout shelter in his family's backyard. There was a gust of malevolent wind and a loud pop, and nothing was ever the same again.

Nobody was ever sure of what had happened, other than the obvious, life was over. Since that day, it was as if Amato had died with the other ninety-six percent of the Earth's population, and been chosen to serve time in a cruel purgatory, a penance for his membership in the society that ended civilization and scarred the earth. After leaving the fallout shelter, he traveled the wastes in a confused trance as the survivors of the atom war crawled back up upon mutated feet, desperate and angry. Wrath begat wrath, and the wars started again, battles for clean water and untainted supplies, he went on to shoot his first gun at 13, kill a man at 14, and finally succumbed to misery and hatred, failing a series of half-assed suicide attempts at 17.

He found himself in a tough spot one day after a real rager of a crank binge, sprawled on a stretch of highway after getting hit by a band of doped-up raiders. They had stripped him of anything of worth and left him to die, after one of their bullets bore into his left temple and ricocheted around in his skull. He looked to the sky, and though his body felt cold and distant by that point, he began to weep, knowing that glorious death was near, and this time it would be final. Luckily, a group of people in the bureaucratic recruitment outfit divisions of the Weiland-Utani corporation came upon his twisted body and offered him salvation on earth, if he subjected himself to the cloning process and joined them in a new city, the framework for the reincarnation of the pre-Collapse days. They presumed his silent weeping and twisted looks of anguish as agreement to this new arrangement.

Weiland-Utani needed new customers; with all the babies yanked out of weeping mothers turning out to be stillborn, they instituted the mandatory clone vats to ensure mankind would be on earth to keep them in business indefinitely. They arranged for him to join the other happy survivors within Freedom City, where there was a surveillance camera for each person, and three people monitoring each camera. Life was bearable for a while, he did what the corporations said and he was paid fairly, and he always had the unveiling of the new Spring line of automatic weapons and skimpy thong underwear to look forward to. Decades passed as if they were hours, the clone vats kept him young, and fast from the clutches of eternal rest.

He quickly became aware of how unpleasant his new situation was. The corporations ran Freedom City with an iron fist, a crime such as petty larceny could get you stuck with six months of hard labor to a half dozen death sentences, to be served at the overzealous police department's earliest convenience. Your neighbors were not friendly, even those supposed to care for what few children there were were involved in abuse and even worse evils, wild animals roamed the streets and the only way to keep their population down was for you and others to eliminate them, the Corporations' idea of keeping the citizens fed resulted in the creation of a new food substance composed of the bodies of the dead; Slagtown and Gangland harbored criminals and miscreants deemed unusable by the Freedom City Wellness Committee, while the technofreaks of Maas Neotek and the insane jihadists of New Clearwater worked on interesting ways to kill you, and each other, every day. Thanks to an accidental chemical spill combined with nuclear radiation left over from the war, even the dead wouldn't stay dead. They walked the streets, intending to make you their next victim, and with only a few exceptions, the zombies were mindless things with only one thought left in their decaying brains, and creatures resembling the vampires of pre-collapse legend roamed the night with blood on their minds. But as with the zombies, there were some exceptions. Certain members of this new vampiric race possessed an informing intelligence and retained all the memories of the time Before they had been turned. Weiland-Utani's Contamination Hazard & Urban Disposal operation had backfired terribly, spawning a race of mutant sewer dwellers in the streets below you, while even worse things lurked deeper in the subways, and beneath them lay a vast tunnel network, the nest of a race of creatures belched up from the worst dregs of Hell. This was the world humanity had inherited, they were doomed to haunt it forever. You, as a member of the race, were a consumer first and a soldier second, gifted with the opportunity to die every death imaginable. The glory of capitalism kept you immortal and the genius of neo-science kept you strong.

"And let's not forget Mondo corp," Kristen added, startling Amato out of his musings, "the force behind W-U. You remember their slogan, don't you?"

"Mondo Corp," Amato recited, "without us, you're dead. But I doubt I'll get myself decapitated checking out this Network games Building. They want contestants for their games, not a load of headless corpses."

"If you're gonna do that," Sofia said, "go through the local criminal population first and fill your cooler with heads. After all, they'll reclone automatically thanks to most of the Slagtown scumbags havin' the clonin' facilities set to autoclone them when they die or get killed or whatever it is they do to get themselves dead."

"Uh, what else can they do to get themselves dead apart from dying and getting killed?" Kristen asked with a smile.

"Hmmm," Amato said, "Let's see. They could hang out in a high rad zone for a while, grow themselves a second head that swears at the wrong person at the wrong time and get attacked, or grow a third arm that randomly attacks someone and get killed that way, or they could get run down by a train in the subway tunnels because they picked the wrong time to go rooting around down there, or get chomped by a crocodile in the sewers because they just couldn't do without the bong they just dropped down a manhole by mistake and couldn't be bothered to go to Vice City and buy a new one, or they could go messing about with the RDCD unit in the recycling center and get carved up by it because they tried recycling something other than a corpse in it, or they could go psycho and attack a citizen in front of an FCPD camera, like sanju routinely does and get clawed up by a k-9 enforcer or six, or they could eat one of Carlos Hernandez's J and W's Kids' Combo Meals and get zombie rot from it and finish up as a run of the mill brainless shambler, or they could get it into their heads that they could fly and try jumping off the roof of Any Port, or they could possibly ..."

"Ok, ok, sweetheart," Sofia said, "we know there's a trillion or so ways to get dead around here. And one of them might just be pokin' around that games Building. Also, haven't ya got some things to do around here Before we take Kristen out to help her get some more cash?"

"Such as?" Amato asked with a smile.

"Your armor's a bit on the damaged side," Sofia replied, "ya may wanna fix it or try to Before goin'' out and tanglin' with the odd chud, Chomoninja, or tank boy."

"What the hell's a tank boy?" Kristen asked.

"A variety of Chomologist," Amato replied, "chomoninjas are females of the species, so to speak, and tank boys are the males. also, there's the random suicide bomber who shows up in freedom city from time to time wearing an explosive belt."

"And what's a Chomologist?" Kristen asked.

"They live in New Clearwater," Amato responded, "I don't know exactly what chomology is, but whatever it is, its practitioners hate the hell out of everyone else on the planet."

As Amato bent and began attempting to secure patches to his chudskin jacket, Kristen opened her trail pack and got out a pack of cigarettes of her own, lit one, and smoked as the FNN reporter began going on about a group of prisoners escaping from the prison in gangland and some outlaw or other getting killed somewhere. Following that, the "Games" add came on once more.

"Oh shit! see what happened?" asked Amato, looking up from his labors, "Kristen did get the head of a chobo, and now she wants a morning sigret."

"Don't start this comedy act of yours early in the mornin' unless you want me to chase you all around Slagtown," said Sofia laughing, then she noticed the ad on the television.

"why are they runnin' that thing again?" she asked, sounding almost as if the games ad had offended her by running too many times.

"Maybe they're so new that they have no contestants at all," ventured Amato.

"And ya got that curiosity goin'' on," Sofia said, "I can see it. Ya won't be satisfied until ya get a look at it."

"Not only that,' Amato said, "but you were wondering what fun guns was."

"Not enough to go there," Sofia said with a smile.

"That's not what you said when we first found that tower in the Juicer camp and got told about their god," answered Amato, "and you just had to get us both kitted up in hostile environment suits and headed off to vault 4 to figure out just what in the hell was going on there."

"What was going on there?" Kristen asked.

"Amato's better at tellin' stories than I am," Sofia said, "Let him tell ya."

"Well," Amato began, "Sofia and I had been through the Juicer camp a number of times on moonshine runs for care dog. We have a deal with Big Frank, the guy in charge of the settlement of what some people call rednecks who live in the crater rim. we bring them food other than beefalo and chukka, and he gives us all the moonshine we can carry to sell to care dog. One day when we were on the way to the rednecks' trailer camp to load up ..."

Amato and Sofia moved from slagtown, into the crater rim, and made their way into the area most freedom citizens called the Juicer camp as they'd done a few dozen times Before, merely wanting to pass through it and make their way to the area that had been claimed by a group of what Amato thought of as hillbilly moonshiners to get hold of some more fresh stock for Care dog in Any Port. They had started out from the bradbury, taking in their surroundings as they always did, always alert to possible dangers. Small plants grew up through depressions in the pavement, which was broken by large scum-filled craters, some caused by explosions, some caused by the simple passage of time. The shattered concrete ambled at odd angles through the smashed buildings, complementing the bent and rusted light poles to make a bizarro caricature of a street. This state of affairs continued until they came to a collapsed building standing on the east side of the street. they entered it, made their way through it to what had once been its back wall, and passed into an area that appeared to be a broad bowl that some giant hand had crushed into the piles of trash behind the building. Rain water had collected in the central depression, forming a stagnant pool. moving on, they saw the mud-colored tents and huts of the Juicers. These dwellings had been composed of anything and everything the Juicers could lay their hands on. Rusty metal sheets, pieces of old equipment, plastic and cloth fragments, nothing was left to simply rot.

Amato and Sofia had passed through this area many times, using it simply as a landmark on root to somewhere else, whether that somewhere else be the redneck trailer circle, Maas Neotek, or somewhere else east of slagtown. On this occasion, however, something happened that never had Before. as they walked between the piles of refuse that had been cobbled together into makeshift dwellings, they heard an amplified voice boom through the area.

"Gather all you can and let the land serve you," it said.

"what the ...?" Sofia began.

"Whoever that is," Amato answered, "they're broadcasting to that loudspeaker tower we saw the first time we were here.

"But who the hell is it?" Sofia asked, "and where the hell are they?"

"I'm not sure," Amato replied, "but they can't be too far away. The electromagnetic pulse that came with the bombs isn't completely gone yet. It's on its way out, but long range broadcasts are still pretty much out of the question."

"who do ya think we can ask about that voice?" Sofia asked.

"The only people who probably know anything about it would be the local Juicer population," Amato responded.

they were approaching a hut of sorts located near the loudspeaker tower, a hut from inside which, movement could be discerned.

"Looks like we've found the person we can ask about it," Amato said, moving toward the hut's entrance.

As they entered the hut, they noticed that its soul inhabitant was a woman, and was at least a bit interested in what some would have referred to as creature comforts. a hammock was strung between two of the dwelling's supports and the pelt of some sort of furry animal was spread on the floor. As they stopped, the woman turned toward them.

"Greetings. May the wastes not devour you."

"greetings," Amato responded.

"who are you?" Sofia asked, "as for us, I'm Sofia, and this is Amato."

"Yes, greetings. Me juicer Taryn, interpreter of the will of our *God," the woman responded.

"You have a god?" Amato asked, "will you tell us about him?"

J' Taryn began to speak then. Sofia and Amato listened, wondering at first what any of what she was saying had to do with the voice from the tower, but as she continued, they began to suspect that the voice from the tower was being purposely transmitted to the Juicers for some unknown purpose.

"You tek men have crazy god, Jesus Christ or something, with his magic bread and wine-blood. It is complete joke! Our god, Hovah, is wise. We try to learn about your god, Jesus. We do not understand much, but what we do know comes out to this. He can make bread from his skin, wine from his blood, fish from other fish, and burns you forever if you are not perfect in his eyes. Bread and drink is nice, but how it fix anything? He say he will guide man to salvation, but that leaves tek man blind to fact we already have been saved by world. It is very sad that common man follow blindly behind a god who not do anything for followers. J' Hovah, our god, is kind. Every day he give us words of encouragement from tower outside. Your Christ says you die if you do bad things, our god tell us not to die. Much more productive. Our god tell us to gather, your Christ tell you to worship. Waste of time! J' Hovah instructs us to gather all we can for benefit of clan. We use everything because nature gives it to us. Tek man also give it to us. Some stuff from very old and dead tek men. Some stuff from tek men in city. We use it all because it will help us and help nature. We not picky like tek men, we can make clothes out of animals and bugs. It is good life. Juicer clan very proud of craftsmanship. We good at making clothes from beefalo and small chukka creatures. We create bug carapace armor design, very useful and stylish-looking. We also work on making armor that work like bug does. Newest design is like bug legs, very sticky and help you climb better. We not share it with tek men though, they no appreciate it. Perhaps you could prove self to clan if you want it so badly."

"And how will we prove ourselves?" Sofia asked.

J' Taryn looked at Sofia, smiled briefly, and began to speak once more.

"Tek man too busy trying to claim his god better than other gods to see how other people feel. Perhaps you should go on vision quest and communicate with J' Hovah. You come back enlightened and better person from it. I will know when you have seen our god, trust Taryn."

Before either Amato or Sofia could say anything in response, the voice from the tower boomed through the camp once more.

"The land gives us everything we need to sustain ourselves indefinitely."

"What the hell's that supposed to mean?" Sofia whispered in Amato's ear.

"Not a clue," Amato answered as he accompanied her out of the hut.

Their eyes lit for a moment on the loudspeaker tower. It was a tall metallic structure, rusted crimson red and slightly warped. Large loudspeakers adorned every side of the tower. A quiet feedback loop echoed from the loudspeakers, interrupted occasionally by the sound of someone speaking.

"I think someone's havin' these folks on," Sofia said.

"question is, who and why?" Amato asked.

"Maybe we ought to find out," Sofia said.

"And where should we start looking," Amato inquired.

"well," Sofia responded, "we've been to the rednecks' trailer camp already, through Maas Neotek a few times, we've also been just outside Glowstiller, through the Ashen Valley, and at least near Mount fisty, so most likely the answer's in the wasteland near here."

"The wasteland is radiated," Amato said, "we'd better get some radiation protection."

As they turned toward the path that led back toward Slagtown, the tower boomed out another message.

"If you live among wolves, learn to howl like one."

A yelp caught their attention, and they saw a wild dog, probably a wolf, about to lift its leg against the tower, or at least that had been what it had been getting ready to do Before the voice had come from the structure. It was now making ready to run for a quieter area in which to take a piss. The hair on the back of its neck was standing on end and its head was down, its teeth bared.

"Apparently the tower doesn't like bein' pissed on," Sofia said.

Amato and Sofia returned to the bradbury and retrieved a pair of hostile environment suits from the wardrobe set up in one corner of the main room, donned them, and made to set off on what the Juicer woman had referred to as a vision quest. The hostile environment suit was an improvement on the run of the mill radiation suit. It was a reinforced, bright orange full-body suit made of a thick, resilient polymer (among other things). Designed for extremely hostile environments, and even deep water due to the breathing apparatus in the upper half, the suit was designed to protect the wearer from almost any sort of hazard (short of hard pressure). A cloudy face-shield was built in to the hood, which was seamed at the neck. The suit's thickness didn't warrant wearing much else, however, so Amato and Sofia left their usual armor in the wardrobe and left the bradbury, ignoring the stares they were getting from the local Slagtownies.

They entered the juicer camp and after checking their surroundings, not to mention the readouts on the built in systems on their hostile environment suits, picked their way along what could only be described as a river of toxic muck from the freedom city sewer systems, and into the Wastelands. The dusty sand dunes compacted there, pressed up against the sloped bank of a dark river of slow-moving sewage and debris. The disgusting muck oozed like a cancer across the clean sands, spilling in curving waves from its source somewhere far to the north and west. Normally the steep banks were treacherous with sandslides and sinkholes, but a collection of discarded iron scrap and plastic buckets had piled up to form a rude ford across to the other side. Further into the Wastelands, the sand turned to an odd mixture of grime and flatform sandstone, ascending in natural carved steps off to the north and northwest. The pattern was broken by the great sickly-green curve of what some people called the radiation Wash, which melted and flattened much of the natural landscape to the east and southeast. The monotony of the dull heated wind was occasionally broken by a puff of fresh air, gone even as it was recognized. A single sage brush struggled upright here and there from a crack between two of the sandstone plates. Its obviously mutated branches spread their hideous purple knobs towards the unforgiving sky. The sun was beginning to rise upward. Heat poured out of the land. Amato and Sofia were thankful for the Jiffy-time water condensers they carried, for if they'd not had those, even with the hostile environment suits, they'd have died of thirst in that poisoned spot, or would have if they'd not already been dead. The loose sand skittered along the glassy edge of the great Wash. Their faces warmed further from the ambient radiation, burning with an unhealthy glow. Off to the east the great glassy plain stretched to the horizon, offering nothing but sunstroke and lacerated feet. The wind gusted oddly like the respiration of some great beast, sending eddies of sand curling off the tops of the dunes. They were forced to squint into the swirling grit, trying to make out whether the faint black dots on the horizon were figures, structures, or mirages. Further into the wash, The sand had been etched into perfect, frozen waves of bright green glass. Some sort of air-burst nuke had inscribed a perfect glassy circle stretching for miles in every direction. The air crackled with unspent radiation, invisibly piercing anything it encountered. Here and there the razored lips of the glassy dunes revealed the horrors of their contents: a blackened car, a half melted horse, a human limb captured in the very instant of combustion, all were encased permanently in atomic ice. Endless waves of semi-molten sand shifted beneath their feet. The land was a hideous yellow-green color, like fermented flesh, and the air had the charged feel of static electricity. The hot wind blew constantly, airborne grit seeking the openings in their clothes and armor. The dunes gathered and narrowed as they continued trudging through the seemingly endless expanse of ruin, funneling off to the west as they sloped downwards. Occasional rough chunks of granite turned under their feet, battered from the rocky crags to the west from an eternity of desert heat. The wind played tricks, whispering across sand and sage, curling little dust devils around their feet. At one point, something slid in the rocks and then caught itself between two of them, causing Sofia to draw her gun for a moment, an action she quickly regretted when she found it to be some form of smallish but obviously mutated lizard.

Amato and Sofia moved through this man-made Hell, going in a general westward direction, toward what appeared to be a depression worn into the radioactive sands by some wind storm or other, the depression remaining thanks to a rocky overhang that provided some shelter from the glairing sun and blowing greenish dust. The long drifts and furrows of coarse sand ended there, blown by the scorched wasteland wind into an odd depression below the rocky overhang. Bare granite crags rose above them, casting bleak shadows over the parched land. Beneath them the sand formed a bowl-shaped depression that offered a modicum of respite from the killing heat. The weathered stone was chipped and gouged oddly, something Sofia made a mental note of. They made to sit down to rest when Sofia moved a few rocks aside and revealed a hatch-like entrance leading directly into the desert floor. Amato aided in moving more rocks aside, clearing the door completely. Sofia located a valve wheel in the center of the door and attempted to turn it, causing a fine shower of rust and sand to flake off and go blowing away on the wind that managed to make it into the sheltered area. The door slowly irised open and they entered the newly revealed facility, finding themselves in the entrance corridor of a small "Class C" survival vault from Before the collapse. The tunnel was a long tube of stainless steel, broken at intervals by red heatlamps and gusting detox airjets. The low hum of machinery as well as the flicker of the lights suggested that the vault implausibly still had a working power supply. Basic steel grating lined the corridor, clattering as the two explorers walked. An ancient red fire extinguisher hung from one wall, frozen there by ancient rust. Darkness loomed at the end of the corridor, darkness that could have been hiding anything. Amato and Sofia looked about for a moment, and then moved to the nearest exit from the tunnel, finding themselves in a small rectangular room with walls of blank concrete and steel. Tiny frosted lights were embedded in the ceiling, but a long scorch mark running up the wall from the switch suggested that something had burned them out over the long years of silence. Apparently this room was once used as a security station for the vault, and a pair of utilitarian steel tables still lined one side of the room. Incredibly, a single poster still clung to one wall by yellowed tape. "Hang in there!" espoused the little kitten on the poster, although some passing jackass had turned the furry beast into a radcat by adding a barbed green tail and yellowed eyes with magic marker.

"Apparently people had just as much of a sick sense of humor Before the collapse," Sofia mused.

After a brief inspection of the room, they returned to the entrance tunnel and followed it to another door, finding themselves in a room marked "foyer". The foyer was a great crossroads of passages within the vault. Four tunnels met there at the points of the compass, entering into a large circular rotunda lit far overhead by an open skylight. A column of light shone down upon a raised dais, upon which rested a large steel desk. Odd bits of refuse and garbage were piled at the edges of the room, but the dais was strangely clean. A large, well-lit area lay through a door in the southern wall of the foyer. The floor of the room beyond was bare concrete, covered with a fine layer of chalky dust. Evenly spaced throughout the room were a number of large concrete workstations with steel tops. Each was apparently designed to hold a large mill or metalwork assembly, but nothing now remained of the valuable machines but their station joists. A cool breeze wafted in from somewhere, its source untraceable. Another large room with an oddly curved ceiling lay through another door. The room was filled with rusted bunkbeds, missing even their mattresses. It appeared that at one time the facility could accommodate nearly 50 vault dwellers at a time, each with access to a small water basin and cabinet next to every bunkbed. Now the water basins were filled with grit, the cabinets were broken and empty, and the vault dwellers were restless ghosts.

"What the hell ...?" Amato began in a hushed voice.

"Whatever this place was designed to protect people from," Sofia mused, "it don't look like it did a very good job of it."

As Sofia spoke, she pointed at a stairway leading down into a deeper area of the vault. she and Amato descended the stairs and found themselves in a section of the vault that seemed to be intended for people important enough to have their own rooms, as opposed to living in the barracks above. Dim red emergency lighting reflected off of the stainless steel floor and walls, and thick metal doors were evenly spaced down the length of the hallway. as their feet touched the last step, a metallic figure moved into view. It was a small plasteel droid, about two and a half feet tall. It traveled on a pair of rubberized treads attached to an armored chassis and central column. A panel of lights and diodes took up the center of the column, topped by a pair of alien-looking sensors. It was armed with some sort of odd black arm and protruding barrel. It tracked them for a moment, and then aimed at Sofia.

Amato aimed his rifle at it and let loose a burst of automatic fire. The security bot gave back for a moment, and then aimed at him, but Sofia fired at it in her own turn, causing it to give back once again. It apparently was not used to dealing with multiple targets. Its arm swung between them, and the barrel set into it fired off a burst of bluish light, which scored one of the metallic walls, turning it white hot in an instant.

"Jesus Christ!" Amato exclaimed as the thing tried to zero in on him again.

Sofia fired at it again, and the combined fire caused something to let go inside the thing, and it went crashing to the ground, smoke and sparks belching from it.

"I had no idea this place was guarded," Amato said.

"Before today, we had no idea this place even existed," Sofia returned.

They moved to a door that was clearly not only unlocked, but irreversibly open, and found themselves in a large rectangular cafeteria kept just under the main thoroughfare of the vault. Rows of tables and plastic chairs were tossed willy-nilly, as if a vast assembly had been suddenly and irreversibly interrupted. Scattered food, now dust for ages, left slight discolorations on the white tiles, while other darker stains were of unknown origin. A long tray slide and food station arrangement lined the far wall, although steel shutters had been pulled down over each. One of the sets of shutters had been buckled severely from a savage blow or flying body. They reversed direction, avoiding the lower levels, knowing that they'd meet up with more of the security bots, and their ammunition was running just a bit low and they couldn't afford to end up in a fire fight with too many of them.

They made to return to the exit, but Sofia stopped and pointed back into the ready room.

"There's somethin' odd about the way those tables are set up," she said, "I think we ought to check that room out once more Before leavin'."

Amato accompanied her as she reentered the ready room and gave her a boost onto one of the steel tables. just as she was about to begin poking at a darkened panel in the metal ceiling, a voice boomed through the facility, its source a speaker set high on one of the walls.

"One can survive anything these days, except death. Do not die."

"What the ...?" Sofia began, nearly losing her balance on the tables. Amato reached forward to support her, after getting over his own shock at the sudden intrusion on the silence of the place.

"I recognize that voice," he said, "it's the same voice that broadcast from that loudspeaker tower back at the Juicer camp. Whoever Hovah is, he's here somewhere."

Sofia continued fiddling with the ceiling panel and eventually pried it loose, revealing the entrance to a vent network. Amato boosted her up and in, then followed himself, finding himself in a narrow air vent, apparently running throughout the small survival vault. The air was slightly cool and fresh, and blew slowly through the passage. A sliver of light shone up from the room below. They followed the shaft, crawling on hands and knees. After a couple turns, they were presented with a partially closed panel. After a bit of fiddling, they managed to open it and enter the resulting passage, finding themselves in what appeared to be a narrow escape chute, allowing those in the deepest recesses of the Vault to escape to the surface, up a molded steel ladder inside an armored column. The ladder led up several stories into darkness, but the exit seal had been horribly buckled by a nuke or earthquake. The only way out of the ladder appeared to be the air duct they'd just quitted or down into a lower room. They made their way out of the chute and stretched to unstiffen their limbs, which had been undergoing a bit of punishment in the confined spaces of the ducting. the room below the chute was apparently the blast shelter used by the vault's original inhabitants, which seemed to be the most secretive area of the Vault, carefully hidden from common people. Heavy steel trusses were welded to the ceilings and walls, making it easy to trip or slam one's head, but also making the room impervious to shockwaves. The silence there was profound, apart from a soft sound coming from below. A door led out of the room into another, and the two explorers went that way to see what was what. The room revealed by their lanterns was marked by a sign that read "Armory". If the blast shelter and its inhabitants were the heart of this Vault, the armory was its armored fist. This room originally existed for no other purpose than protecting and stockpiling the armaments needed to defend the compound from its enemies, both outside and within. Empty weapon racks and ammunition crates lined the room, and a pair of unbroken wooden rations crates lay in one corner. Sofia inspected the contents of the crates, and after a moment, removed them and stored them in her trail pack.

"What did you find in those?" Amato asked.

"Nothin' but A-Rations boxes and C-Rations cans," Sofia answered, "but it's better food than the crap they sell in the Freedom City restaurants. If we need regular food, we can use that stuff."

they returned to the blast shelter and Sofia began poking around on the floor. After a moment, she scraped away some of the dust and collected debris, finding a hatch handle. She pulled upward and a square section of the floor swung up with a protest of rusty hinges.

She and Amato lowered themselves into the room, the first thing catching their eye being a sign that read "Radio room". The room was large with various consoles, buttons, and monitors. Everything was dark and unpowered, many of the consoles even smashed or missing an assortment of buttons or switches, but one powered console still remained, attached to which was a large black box with a blinking red and green lead on one side. As Sofia reached out to touch the box, the voice spoke again, clearly coming from the box and transmitted through the pa console, through the facility, and to the loudspeaker tower in the Juicer camp.

"You have survived because you were meant to. our mission is to salvage the items we have lost. Use what you find. surplus supplies should be sent to your superiors. Things are going well. soon we will have many more things. Keep scavenging. You may be the one who finds the thing to save us all."

"That thing is Hovah?" Sofia asked in disbelief as they returned to the blast shelter and closed the hatch after them, knowing that anything they said would be transmitted to the Juicers thanks to their steps being transmitted through the pa system, and therefore waiting until they were out of range of its microphone. they both realized at the same moment that that was how J'Taryn would know when someone had seen their God, "that simple black box? That recorder/player thing?"

"Those people back there are worshiping a goddamn machine," Amato breathed, "they heard the voice from that tower and thought it was a God of some sort, thanks to forgetting their roots. And they named it J'Hovah, a voice that told them to gather, not worship, to survive, not die. It must have been a breath of fresh air for them."

"But who set this up?" Sofia asked, "this setup looks so fuckin' on purpose. There's no way this could have happened by accident or chance."

"I don't know," Amato responded, "but I think we should get out of here. The power units in our hostile environment suits are running a bit low."

They retraced their steps through the vault and out into the toxic Wastelands, and eventually back to the Juicer camp. After a short interlude spent in J'Taryn's hut, they returned to Freedom City, Sofia's eyes alternatively dry and full of tears over the subjugation of an innocent nomadic tribe by parties unknown and unseen.

"You're serious?" Kristen asked, "The people in that Juicer settlement are worshiping a machine?"

"completely," answered Amato, "but we didn't dare tell them that. they built their entire culture around the words from that box thing, which I personally believe was originally started to prompt the survivors of vault 4 to salvage what they could and bring it back to the vault and not hoard it. I think it was originally intended to make sure the vault survivors towed the line and stored the supplies in the armory or had them give the stuff to a superior to store there. There used to be a lot more stuff stored down there too. we could tell that by the marks in the dust. But there was pretty much nothing left."

"Who do you think set up that loudspeaker tower in the Juicer camp though?" Kristen asked.

"Not a clue," Sofia replied, "but it was pretty old itself. I think it was left over from the days Before the collapse and someone found the vault and connected the systems from the radio room to it, the Juicers heard it, and made a God out of it, takin' what it said literally."

"There are a lot of things like that going on," Kristen said, "at least that's what some folks say."

"What exactly do those folks say?" Sofia asked interestedly.

"Well, it's more what they elude to," Kristen said, "I mainly heard stuff being talked about by people gathered around one of the soda machines or in 8/20 Memorial Park. They sometimes talked about the usual crap with raiders and so forth, but sometimes they'd say things about there possibly being machines down in the sewers that came up to kill people, things living underground, and other stuff. We know that things called chuds live underground, and that there are gators down there too, and if that's true, a lot of the other stuff could be too. One of the things I heard once had something to do with some kind of facility somewhere in gangland where people fought things to the death."

"I've been there," Amato said, "I finished up making it all the way through the contest too. that was shortly Before the facility was shut down for some reason or another."

"You and that curiosity," Sofia said with a smile.

"seeing as how it was you who was responsible for the discovery that Hovah was a machine," Amato said, putting an arm around her, "I think we've both got it."

"And did J'Taryn do what she promised?" Kristen asked.

"Oh, yes she did," Amato replied, reaching into his trail pack and bringing out some loosely bound sheets of paper and showing them to Kristen, "she gave us a complete set of instructions on how to make the gauntlets and footings she told us about. I actually managed to make a couple sets. I think I even have enough materials left over to make you a set."

"what's the stuff for anyway?" Kristen asked.

"Like she said," Amato returned, "the resulting pieces of clothing are sticky on the outside, making it a hell of a lot easier to climb. Very useful when in an area like the mountains near the crater rim."

"That is if ya don't take the quick way and have either bucko or Alexis fly ya there in a chopper," Sofia added.

"Those two don't fly either to the mountains or the Ashen Valley," Amato said, "and there aren't that many private pilots who'd take the chance at doing it either. It's too easy to get shot down by whatever the hell routinely hovers over the area shooting at stuff with a flac cannon."

"Have ya ever found out exactly what that is up there?" Sofia asked.

"No," answered Amato, "and I don't think anyone else has either."

"Maybe it's Hovah, all pissed off and wantin' the world to know it," Sofia responded with a slight smile.

"That doesn't fit the stuff spewed by that black box in Vault 4," Amato said, "Hovah tells the Juicers to live off the land and throw nothing away. He or it or whatever doesn't go for the hoarding of technology or the use of heavy weapons."

"But how do we know that?" Sofia inquired, "just cause it says that stuff to the juicers don't mean it don't have another side to it."

"Whatever does all that shooting over the Ashen Valley doesn't bother talking," Amato replied, "and Hovah strikes me as all words."

"Ya could be so wrong about that," Sofia said.

"I could," Amato said, "but I think that thing over the Ashen Valley's something else entirely. I've never looked up when I've been in the area, but I'm betting if I did, I'd see one hell of a big airship of some kind, and airships have people in them."

"Not always," Sofia returned, "remember all the stories about airships pre-collapse people could run from miles away?"

"Those weren't airships," Amato said, "those were missiles, and those didn't shoot flac cannons at people. They just fell out of the sky and made a hell of a big bang when they hit the ground."

"That all depends," Sofia said, "but ya may be right. after all, we don't know what all they had Before everyone started nukin' everyone else."

"That we're still finding, bit by bit," Kristen said, "and from what little I've gathered, a lot of it's dangerous."

"Dangerous is right," Sofia said, "Amato has a way of puttin' it. He says we're livin' in a world where the machines don't work, and sometimes eat the men when they do."

After a few more minutes spent in conversation, the three of them left the bradbury and headed for Freedom city and another day of work, such as it was. Amato separated from the group first, saying that he needed to scavenge for parts for something, then Sofia separated from Kristen after seeing her safely to any Port. As Kristen entered the bar, she heard a thump from inside and tensed, at least until she got a look into the main area of the bar and saw someone just rising from a partial crouching position, their elbows just having made contact with the jukebox. the juke in question hadn't been working and the person, whoever it was, had just managed to jar it back into life.

"well," Care dog said, "that's one way to avoid paying some idiot with no skills for not fixing it right."

I agree," said Kristen, "at least it works for a good long time Before it gives up the gray ghost again."

At this point, Kristen noticed the person who had managed to get the juke working. It was one of those Sofia and Amato referred to as number people, those clones who had completely given up their identities to weiland-Utani. This particular number person turned to care Dog and said, "Kids these days. Goin' out to the Mesa, sittin' around getting all 'radiated and growing third eyes and shit. Unbelievable. Even 97Joan came back one day with a second head. Hell, in my day, huffin' paint and shooting supajunk was plenty!"

Kristen ignored this exchange as best she could and headed upstairs. The woman Amato had seen during the visit he'd made up there Before he had encountered Kristen wasn't there, but Kristen had seen her a few times and knew her,, if not by name, then at least by sight. After delivering a few packages for Fat Ratzo and killing a few dogs and Slagtown monkeys that had appeared to be hanging around spying on everyone, she wanted to try something different. She had been warned not to go down in the sewers at the area of 4th and Cheney. "there are big alligators down there," Amato had said, "And I don't think you're ready for them yet. So, after checking her supplies, especially her gun, and getting some fresh clips from both automats and an electric lantern from the local survival shop, she proceeded to fourth and High, only to notice that the soda machine there had broken, and a scrum of what Amato and Sofia called "the number people" were gathered around the machine beating on it and loudly declaring that the damn thing had taken their money. She said, "I can't fix the machine myself, but I know someone who's better at repairing stuff, and if you would all kindly hold your britches for a second, I think I can summon him and someone else from where they have disappeared to." She said this with a grin, but it was clear that the number people were still intent on getting their soda now and only now, but instead of addressing the problem, Sanju, who seemed to be causing the most trouble started fighting with another of the number people who was passing by and who just happened to have soda on their person. This, of course, brought a couple of k9 enforcers, who looked like big, ferocious, robotic dogs to the scene, and they started to deal with the situation by converging on Sanju and attacking her en masse.

Kristen smiled and went on her way, making a mental note to let Amato know about the broken machine. She also thought that the corporation that deployed the soda machine would probably take care of the situation. As she was thinking of this, she didn't realize until a half second later that she was headed to the Final Rest Home. She peeked inside, and saw a couple of the oldsters who inhabited the place. She had heard stories about this place from Amato and Sofia and went in to investigate. Plastic runners over the linoleum led to a plexiglass cubicle with holes for dispensing medication, and fluorescent lights buzzed angrily overhead. the place had a foreboding feeling, and if there were nurses anywhere, they sure weren't in earshot. Further investigation revealed a cafetorium whose only furnishings were white plastic tables lined with benches and littered with trays that contained half-eaten food. Flies buzzed around an overflowing garbage can near the kitchen, which was also full to the brim with half-eaten, rotten food, broken utensils and wadded-up napkins. A couple of old ladies that seemed to be just milling around were in there too, so she went to the kitchen just to poke around. and see what she could find, but all she saw was an industrial-sized sink, and tendrils of mold peeking out of the dishwasher. but what really caught her attention was the trapdoor in the floor. What the hell was a trapdoor doing there? It was a good thing that she bought a sledgehammer from Hell Up In Hardware. Little did she know she'd find something like this, but what precisely was this? She repeatedly battered the trapdoor with her sledgehammer, and it gave way after about six blows. What she saw left her in shock for a few seconds. Big ice cubes? she thought. But what would they be doing down here and for what purpose? No, she corrected herself, they weren't just big; they were man-sized, with what appeared to be shapes inside them, and what was up with those meat hooks on the ceiling? What was this place used for?

suddenly, she heard footsteps and knew she had to get the fuck out of there. She finally stopped running, ending up in a medical supply room off the recreation center. It was full of canes and packages which read "Quietus, and an IV stand had been left there which contained a plastic bag of clear fluid. It definitely looked like this small supply room housed anything the elderly clone could ever need for various ailments. after hiding behind a big box that appeared to contain adult diapers and bedpans, Kristen peeked out and saw nobody. She snuck out the exit near the nurses' station the way she had come through, and figured she'd take cover by doing what she was originally going to do: hang out in the sewers killing chuds, and hopefully a few chobos. But as she passed the orphanage, a whispered conversation from inside caught her attention, so she took cover once again, this time behind a garbage can.

"You fucked up, somehow," said a deep, stern voice, "You underestimated her, you shit, and now she's going to tell everyone she knows about our operation down there. And her and her little friends are going to piece everything together the way they always seem to do nowadays."

"Well, what am I supposed to do about that? you're the one who said the best idea was to throw her in the bradbury basement," said the whiny voice of Alvin.

"but it didn't work, and you should have done damage control, shouldn't you have?" said the deeper voice sarcastically. "keep fucking up and you'll bring a whole ton of shit down on our heads from the big boss at Mondo Corp. You really do not want to do that. If you do, you can expect to finish up as one of our experiments."

"No, of course not. What should I do?" asked Alvin, nearly hysterical.

"You just keep a watch on things, and make sure that the zombitch can't fuck things up for us. I'm sure she will find any way possible to do just that, and she's sneaky, so don't make the mistake you made again, or you can expect to be someone's next project."

In a way, it was good to see Alvin cowering Before another, but in another, it was frightening to think that there was someone who could frighten the psychopathic child killer. After Kristen was sure the coast was clear, she emerged from cover and made her way from the orphanage to the manhole at Fourth and High, checked her gear, and descended, all the while mulling over what she'd overheard and thinking also of what Alvin had said to her Before throwing her into the Bradbury's basement. What precisely was a shoggoth? What actually happened to the children who occasionally vanished without a trace? Amato had told her the previous day that a few kids had escaped the orphanage and were now scrounging for a living in gangland, but that didn't account for all the disappearances by a long way. Then there was the aura of fear that clung to the orphanage cellar. Kristen didn't believe for a moment that it was simply due to childish imagination, especially when every single person who had gone down there felt the exact same thing. She'd gotten a chance to compare notes during her time in the orphanage, and Sofia had mentioned that she had felt the same thing when she had hidden in the basement a few times Before the day Alvin had decided to get a bit friendly with her sister and she'd tried to put a stop to it.

At that point, the sound of something splashing through the filthy water interrupted Kristen's musings and she leveled her gun, prepared for trouble. The splasher, however, turned out to be a small rat, which looked at her for a moment, and then made for less inhabited parts of the sewer system as quickly as it could Before something happened to it. Chud hunting proved, however, to be somewhat unprofitable on this particular day, probably thanks to the incident she'd overheard Amato teasing Sofia about the previous day. Maybe the wild chuds were all avoiding that area for a while to prevent themselves from getting killed, that is if the wild ones had enough reasoning power to think of such things. Kristen moved further and further south, searching for something, anything, she could bring back, be that thing living thing or pre collapse artifact, every now and again checking the power meter on the electric lantern she was using as a light source. If that ran down, she'd definitely have some trouble on her hands unless she was fortunate enough to stumble on an exit from the sewer system by accident.

What she found, however, was not an exit leading up, but one leading down, further into the network of pre collapse tunnels beneath the city. She had been trailing what she'd thought was a chud, when she nearly stepped into emptiness. She regained her balance quickly and utilized her right foot to probe the vacant area Before it. She quickly found a ladder attached to one of the side walls of the shaft she had nearly stepped into and climbed down, finding herself in another type of tunnel entirely. It was completely dry and its air wasn't contaminated by the stink of sewage. As she shone her electric lantern at her new surroundings, she noticed two sets of steel rails set into the tunnel floor which looked as if they had been built for something to either run on or be transported along them. Kristen had heard Amato mention subways and had heard of them Before in stories she'd overheard, stories of vehicles that ran underground for some unknown reason and figured she must now be in a subway tunnel left over from Before the collapse. Her curiosity, at that point, got the best of her, and she began following the rails, wanting to see where this new tunnel would lead her.

After a short time, she came across a break in the wall to her right and diverted to investigate. This cavernous area must have once been a subway station. The intricately tiled ceiling had collapsed in several places, though, and several of the once proud columns supporting the earth above had collapsed, lying broken among the other rubble. A long platform ran the length of the eastern end of the chamber, dropping off into the tunnel she had just quitted. There was a row of rusty turnstiles still standing there, suspiciously like the metallic vertebrae of something horrible resting under the floor. The area beyond was obviously once a huge thoroughfare for travelers. Several large cracked columns still seemed to keep the roof up, but looked as if they could shatter under the pressure at any moment. The occasional rumbling noise that came from some indeterminate source definitely didn't make Kristen feel very comfortable about returning to the tunnel, so she decided she would try to find another way out. The northern wall of the station had crumbled as well, revealing the remains of the station's restrooms, at least Kristen thought that's what lay beyond the hole thanks to the remains of shattered toilets and sinks she could see. There was a huge gaping hole along the southern wall, which squared off at the edges. It looked as if a bomb must have gone off in there, as there were chunks of brick and metal strewn out in a tell-tale blast pattern. Before moving toward the bombed out area, Kristen looked in the only other direction she could have gone in and saw a cavernous chamber of burned out storefronts and debris. The high domed ceiling sent echoes with the eerie sounds of water droplets splashing into stagnant pools on the floor. The bombed out area was scorched black and sooty. Bits of what Kristen thought might be office furniture were embedded into the walls at odd angles. The dust and soot had collaborated to create a fine black silt about an inch deep all over the broken concrete floor. The rubble had shifted into small piles in some places. She looked about and then began attempting to find something among the debris. What she eventually found was a loose slab in the floor, which she moved aside, revealing a hole leading down. she lowered herself down and found herself in one of the cleanest rooms she had ever seen since the collapse had changed the world forever. A doorway led out of the room and into an equally clean hallway, which Kristen followed. Half way along this hallway lay a door marked "authorized Personnel Only". At the end lay an open elevator shaft, in which someone had long ago set up some climbing gear. Said gear was unlike anything Kristen had ever seen Before. She had seen climbing ropes and grappling hooks in the survival shop, but this gear looked to have been composed completely of metal.

After a brief inspection, she lowered herself into the shaft and began climbing down to see what may or may not be at the bottom. After nearly five minutes during which she thought the climb would never end, she found herself in a ruined elevator, the floor of which was no longer completely level. it felt, in fact, as if the entire structure could collapse at any moment, making her very glad that the doors to the ancient elevator car were twisted and bent permanently in the open position. As she quitted the elevator and took note of her new surroundings, she noticed that she wasn't alone. Approaching her was a machine which was like, and yet unlike the thing Amato had told of meeting in vault four. While the thing in vault four had been small and completely machine-like, this one was a chrome and blue humanoid security droid. It had a metal chest linked to lanky cylindrical arms and legs, and a solid chrome head that looked very much like an expressionless skull. The thing moved toward her threateningly and she raised her gun and blasted it a few times, hitting an important component with the third shot, causing it to collapse, belching smoke and sparks.

The hallway sloped downward at an odd angle further along, bent by the shifting earth surrounding it. A huge crack extended from an area where the earth had actually broken through, spilling into piles of rubble on the floor. On one side of the corridor was a room whose door was marked "supply closet", and on the other was a room with a sign depicting a lightning bolt. Kristen didn't' like the look of said sign, so she steered clear of it, moving along the hallway to what appeared to be another platform like the one which had led her into the abandoned station. At the end of the platform was a small drop leading into another tunnel like the one above, and Kristen decided to explore it Before returning to the surface. she thought that tonight, she could be the one with a story to tell.

Amato and Sofia moved through Freedom City, heading north toward the area containing Jack and Wendy's box, but they had no plans to stop there. Thanks to Amato's relating of the story of the Juicers' God to Kristen, his curiosity had gotten the better of him, and shortly after he and Sofia had separated from Kristen, he had suggested that they attempt to locate the only person who could possibly tell them anything about the Juicers. The person in question was the woman Amato had seen in the company of Fat ratzo in any Port. He knew that she lived in or near the Corpclave, at least part of the time, and hoped that she would be there today.

They approached the gate which separated the corpclave from freedom city, glanced at a man in uniform who was apparently stationed there to keep people such as themselves out, entered the alley behind Jack and Wendy's, and began inspecting the wall. After a moment, Sofia began to climb, utilizing handholds worn into the surface, and Amato followed. the climb was relatively easy, and they shortly found themselves once again at ground level.

The street they found themselves on had recently been repaved, and the ever-present dust and grime of freedom City was absent. The buildings lining it on both sides were mostly corporate storefronts and light industrial parks. On one side of the street, about a block up from where they stood, a house broke the pattern of stores and small restaurants. The intersection overlooked by the twin towers of W-U's building and the newly constructed Network games Building resembled the one that ran north from the gate, apart from the replacement of restaurants with such places as the Enhancement clinic, the Mapplethorpe Gallery, Liddy Arms, Marvin's Tobacco Emporium, Threadless, Ye Olde Victrola, Department of Recreational And Experimental Substances, and Securite Entiere. Ironside drive ran in an east west line through corpclave for a few blocks, then intersected with first south Pearl Avenue, then North Pearl. Amato and Sofia turned onto North Pearl, followed it for a couple of blocks, and found themselves at one of the strangest intersections they'd ever seen. rather than a simple four-way intersection, North Pearl intersected with a circular driveway-like stretch of pavement which seemed to serve no other purpose than to look good in the eyes of whichever designer had been responsible for it and to surround a towering apartment complex. The Iterative Loop gave on a small structure half way round the circle, and Amato and Sofia entered it, not wishing to finish up right back where they'd started, noticing a sign reading "Gatehouse" over its door.

The gatehouse was an enormous round-roofed gazebo style building. The roof was perhaps a hundred feet in diameter, and maybe thirty feet in the air. A sign over a smaller doorway to the east read "Condominium Sales Office". Rather than having a northern or southern wall, there were instead massive open archways that led in those directions. The road simply continued through the two arches as if the designer had gotten bored with normality and had decided to finish drawing up his plans after taking a hit or seven of crank. A graceful ribbon of concrete and steel arced over the azure water of the channel below and formed a causeway beyond the gatehouse. Tasteful wrought iron lamp posts placed at regular intervals pointed like delicate fingers towards the sky. Beyond the causeway lay a circular yard bounded on all sides by a circular street which intersected with four streets which led to various areas of the Burbclave. Amato and Sofia spared a glance in several directions, then took the western street, which was marked by a sign reading Keyes Boulevard, which they followed, all the while aware of the alienness of their surroundings. Keyes was a perfectly kept ribbon of asphalt road, flanked by immaculate cement sidewalks and manicured green strips of grass. The high security fences of the area homes were painted to resemble jungle canopies.

Amato and Sofia followed Keyes until it intersected with an access road which consisted of a narrow strip of grass that ran between the walls of the houses, broken only by a set of faint tire tracks. The grassy strip eventually gave on a narrow path through a thick, verdant wood. The trees were overrun by wrist thick brambles, which were bristling with barbed, glistening spikes. These growths were so thick at the base of the trees that it was literally impossible to leave the path.

"Whoever cut this passage must have used chainsaws and napalm," Amato said in a hushed tone.

A hard-packed earth clearing in the middle of the woods formed the end of the path, forcing them to retrace their steps. The brambles were just as thick as on the path leading there, perhaps even thicker. A few scorchmarks here and there indicated that someone was actively keeping the forest from encroaching on this space.

After returning to Keyes, they followed it until it intersected with a wider street baring the sign "Keaton Avenue", which they followed. The streets, which had become progressively cleaner since entering Corpclave and Burbclave were now immaculate, and the homes which lined them were huge, well-built, clean-looking affairs, set back from the road by hedges, and surrounded by wide, sweeping green lawns. Occasionally, they met other people, who when they saw them, sped up to put distance between themselves and the ragged zombies.

Finally, Amato and Sofia reached the Haliberton Arms, burbclave's condominium property.

The lobby was elegant but neglected, as evidenced by the dead spiders in the corners of the room. There was a directory sign on the wall, and Amato consulted it.

"Kasini, 205," he read out. "Let's go."

"Wait," Sofia said softly, looking around. "I'm a little scared to go up there. They say she smart as a whip, that one. when the screecher's raided the weiland-Utani building four years back, she survived without needin to be cloned. And they say she gots money and power."

"She also medics juicers," Amato pointed out. "besides, we're not going to get anywhere standing down here. So, come on, let's go."

Slowly, Amato and Sofia climbed the carpeted staircase. On the first floor was more evidence of the society they lived in. A number of sex slave robots propositioned them, and there was quite a bit of debris around. The second floor lobby also contained a bit of trash, but the doors were clean, and Amato and Sofia had no trouble spotting the door to 205. Amato rang the bell, listening to it chime in the rooms behind the door. Heavy footsteps sounded within, and the Voxguard Diamond lock beeped as the door swung slightly open.

The man that stood in the doorway could only be described by the word huge. Even Amato had to look way up to see his face, and he must have seemed a giant to Sofia. He was wearing a long linen shirt, held on by a narrow belt, and narrow-legged trousers held up by a drawstring. His huge slippered feet were attached to legs like tree trunks, and his arms, which were folded across his chest were the size of split logs. His hair was light brown, and the steel blue eyes that stared out at them from a fully bearded Slavic featured face changed from mild irritation to disgusted contempt as he surveyed them.

"what do you want?" he asked in a heavily accented deep voice.

"Who's that?" Sofia whispered to Amato. "Man Mountain Rock?"

"No," Amato answered quietly, his face deadly serious. "He's a screecher, Sofia, and unless I've missed my guess, a very dangerous one, more so than the others."

"Vladimir, who is it?" This was a young woman's voice, and it was coming nearer. At the name Vladimir, Amato gasped in shock and Sofia asked, "what's wrong?"

"later," Amato hissed as the young woman came into view, seen partially through the small gap the screecher made as he turned partially round toward her.

Both Amato and Sofia gasped as they caught their first glimpse of Maria Kasini. She was short, only slightly taller than Sofia, and her hair looked as if it had been spun by the gods for her using threads of pure gold. Jewels glistened at her throat, and on the fingers of her small hands. she wore no armor, only a red shimese, stockings, a garter belt, and a pair of high-heeled red stilettos. In her arms, a blanket wrapped baby goggled at Amato and Sofia Before puffing out her little cheeks and blowing them a huge raspberry.

"Well, thanks!" Amato said sarcastically, and the baby waved her tiny hands and cooed in her mother's arms.

Maria's skin was the color of good cream, accept for her cheeks which were rosy, and her lips, which were as red as cherries.

Upon seeing Amato and Sofia, Maria smiled.

"Good evening!" she greeted them warmly as if they were old friends, and reached out her hand to shake theirs.

The movement was so fast that Amato saw it only as a blur. The screecher's arm shot out and lifted Maria child and all until she was held tightly in his arms.

"Maria, how many times must I tell you not to extend your hand to strangers, my treasure?" he asked, securing her against himself with one hand, while with the other, he began to quickly swing the door shut.

"Mr. Petrov, Sir?" Amato spoke quickly into the disappearing gap between the door an its frame. "we're not here to harm your family. We only want some information, nothing more. I give you my word on that."

the door stopped swinging, but the expression on the screecher's face radiated only scorn.

"The word of a barbarian is nothing, and the word of a dead barbarian is worth even less."

"But Vladimir darling, they look so pale and ragged," Maria said softly, her own eyes full of the compassion she was known for. "Can't we let them in for a few minutes?"

Vladimir looked down at the woman in his arms and sighed.

"My precious one," he said, his deep voice gentle and patient. "They're pale because they're dead, and they're ragged because they're poor, and poor barbarians want no information. They probably thought you lived alone here, and came here to take advantage of you. No, Darling, I will not have it."

the door began to swing shut again.

"But Vladimir my love, they look sincere enough," Maria pleaded.

"someday, someone very sincere is going to murder you," Vladimir told her.

"I'll reclone," she said, smiling.

Vladimir muttered something in Russian under his breath and stepped back from the door, allowing Amato and Sofia to enter. Taking the baby, Vladimir placed her in an autocare cradle in the living room, and then, sat down on a sofa, which groaned protestingly under his weight, and pulled Maria onto his lap. Meanwhile, Amato and Sofia were looking around the elegant room, amazed by the cleanliness and luxury.

"Sit down," Maria said, pointing to a couple of chairs in the room. "what information do you need? Ah, but first, where are my manners? I'm Maria. It's a pleasure to meet you. what are your names?"

"I'm Amato, and this is Sofia," Amato replied.

"And what information are you looking for?" Maria asked.

"Yes," said Vladimir, reaching one hand under Maria's shimese and inserting two of his large fingers into her sex. "I'd like to know that myself, but do make it quick. Your smell is offensive."

"Vladimir!" Maria exclaimed, and Vladimir actually laughed at the shocked look on her face.

"My love, you are quite amusing," he told her, wiggling his fingers into her still deeper.

Neither Amato nor Sofia had ever spoken to someone while she was being fingered, but Amato smiled and asked, "People say you know a lot about juicers. is it true?"

"I know some things about them," Maria agreed. "not everything by far."

"You are so adorable when you're being modest, my rose," Vladimir said, beginning to lick her ear as his thumb rubbed on her clitoris and his fingers worked in and out of her.

"What do you want to know about juicers?" Maria asked, running her hand over Vladimir's shoulder.

slowly, Amato and Sofia told Maria the tale of their vision quest, and the loud speaker and radio system they had found, which was the truth of Hovah. Maria listened, and nodded.

"what I wanted to know is why that setup exists," Amato finished.

Maria opened her mouth to answer, but at that moment, she began to tremble all over, her breath coming in sharp hard gasps.

"Yes, my treasure, yes!" Vladimir spoke. "that's my little one! Release yourself to me. Don't fight it. You know you can't win. You know I'll get what I want in the end. One way or another, you will do as you're told."

Maria's body stiffened, and then began to convulse. Her head fell back against Vladimir's supporting arm, and her legs flew out to either side of her. When she was finally still, Vladimir removed his fingers, and brought them to his mouth, licking them.

"Yes, that's nice," he crooned, standing and undoing the drawstring on his trousers, letting them fall to the ground. "That's delicious. Now, you're going to make your Vladimir feel so good, my little one."

He removed from his trousers a penis about the size of a rolling pin. Sofia gasped. It was no wonder that when screecher's were finished raping a woman, her vagina was left a bloody wreck.

Vladimir sat down again, and eased Maria gently down onto that swollen mass of flesh, gasping slightly as he thrust upward into her.

"That's it, my little one! Now, you just be a good little doll and hold still so your Vladimir can fuck you."

So saying, he wrapped his arms around her and began to slide her up and down, thrusting into her, his face a mask of aggressive lust.

"are we gonna be able to talk to her at all?" Sofia asked Amato in a whisper.

"screecher's believe one of the reasons for having a little one as they call it is so they've got a wet pussy to stick it in whenever they want, which is all the time. If he's not doing something to her, he's thinking of something to do to her, and if he's not thinking of something to do to her, she's sleeping, and then, he's thinking about torturing and killing for fun and food."

Maria smiled a little as if she heard their conversation, and when she spoke, her voice was surprisingly controlled, considering the fact that she was being slammed from beneath by a human battering ram.

"Nobody knows how that setup got there, but I have my theories," Maria said. "My theory is that it was never meant for the juicers at all. I think that the instructions and the complex may have had something to do with a cult, however, a cult that believed that they were meant to survive the collapse. Obviously, they didn't. I think that the juicers wandered into that setup already made. The reference to giving surplus goods to superiors in my opinion refers to a paramilitary type group."

"do you think any of them know that Hovah isn't real?" Amato inquired.

"That I don't know," Maria said. "If they do, they're doing a good job of keeping it a secret."

Vladimir tensed, tightening his arms around Maria. his tongue licked her neck, as he slammed into her harder.

"You tight, wet little doll!" he exclaimed. "I can taste your pleasure, and your pain. This feels so good. That's right. Hold still now. Hold...!" His words turned into a savage scream as his body convulsed.

"Oh, my treasure, that was good!" he exclaimed, caressing her and pressing her cheek to his own. "That was so good. You are always good. You're my good fine little golden-haired doll."

He stood, pulled up his trousers, and then, sat back down, snuggling Maria to him, his large hands caressing and stroking her, his eyes soft as he looked at her.

"I thought that maybe, somebody was trying to use the juicers for something," Amato said.

"Then, that would imply that one of their leaders isn't what they seem," Maria remarked, resting her head on Vladimir's shoulder. "but to know for certain, you have to find out what came first, the juicers or the voice. If the voice was already broadcasting, then, perhaps the leaders who made the first vision quests long ago learned the secret, and for the sake of needing some law and order in the tribe kept it a secret. Of course, there is a possibility..."

Vladimir laughed, a deep, comfortable laugh.

"My darling, no barbarian is ever what he or she seems to be," he said. "and there is the possibility that someone else turned on that system after the people were already there, and there plans in such case would depend on what other recordings there are available for playback."

"Other recordings?" Sofia asked. "what other recordings?"

"If I knew, I might tell you, if I felt you had the mind to comprehend it," Vladimir responded, Before settling his eyes on Maria's face. He lowered his mouth and kissed her lips slowly, running his tongue over them.

"My little girl's getting sleepy," he commented. Then, he looked up at Amato. His steel blue eyes fastening on Amato's own. "Do you know how such recordings could be set up?"

"There are two ways actually," Amato said. "One is that someone would have to change the recordings after a certain amount of time. The other is that it's on a time loop, and the recordings we're hearing now will automatically change at a certain predetermined time."

"Exactly," Vladimir responded. "Good to know you aren't as stupid as the average dead barbarian. But remember, no barbarian is ever what he or she seems."

"some are," Maria said sleepily.

"Only inside your sweet, pretty little mind," Vladimir said, rising. "You're tired. It's time for me to put you in bed. don't you worry. I'll be there soon."

Vladimir walked into the bedroom, and after a few minutes, came out, calling something in Russian to Maria over his shoulder.

"where did you meet her?" Amato asked.

"At Weiland-Utani four years ago," Vladimir responded. "I was leader of that party that raped and killed those barbarian bitches. we got food enough to last over a month from that, and all of it spiced with pain and fear." He licked his full lips at the memory. "I am hearing a noise up above me, and I looked up and I see her standing on a landing, not hiding or running, just standing there. She had a dead deformed infant in her arms, and she was crying as if her little heart would break. I'd never seen a barbarian do that Before, so I broke away from the others and came up the stairs to her, and she is crying and rocking the dead infant, and praying, and so I tell her that the baby is dead, and she falls in my arms even though I am covered with blood, and she cried, and it was so awful that crying, because it was real somehow, not for pity or sympathy, just hard crying from pain and grief. The moment I touched her I knew I had to have her for my own little one. I had know idea she was so sweet and trusting that night. I wonder how she survived Before she had me to care for her."

He glanced over at his daughter, who lay sleeping in her cradle and smiled.

"You're a healthy little girl, aren't you?" he crooned down at her. "I make them good and healthy and strong."

"Now," he said, turning round to face Amato and Sofia again. "It is time for you to leave. Maria is asleep, and can speak to you no further this evening, and I have no use for you as I cannot eat rotten meat. So go on and get out."

"Thank you for your time, Mr. Petrov, sir," Amato said, rising.

Sofia rose as well, and the two of them left. Vladimir watched them go from the window, then, returned to his little one's side, stripped off his clothes, and climbed into bed, gathering her into his strong arms.

The male barbarian's theory of one of the juicer leaders not being who and what they seemed interested him a little, and he had to admit that their curiosity about the matter of Hovah had been admirable. Vladimir stroked his little one's lovely blond hair, then, leaned over to take her sleeping breast in his mouth. He always felt he could think better with her tits in his mouth. He sucked and licked, tasting her skin, her sleep, her security in the knowledge of his love for her, her sexual satisfaction, and the thing that always pleased him the most, her pleasure in his control over her, her pleasure in the way he viewed her as his property, a sweet little doll. As his mouth worked over her body, tasting her flavor and her emotions, he wondered about the two dead barbarians, and the secrets of juicers, but by the time he mounted his little one's sleeping body to enter her again, he thought that he really didn't much care if another group of barbarians worshipped speaker systems. It made them no less regressed and foolish than the other barbarians, though at least they were less willing to try to have others killed, but as long as they left his people and their little ones and children alone, they could worship rock formations for all he cared. What after all did the cultural practices of barbarians mean in the end? Very little.

Kristen followed the tunnel until it came to an end at another drop. She carefully made her way down and found herself in a cracked tunnel which ended at a large hole blasted into the wall of some kind of underground facility. She negotiated her way through the hole and found herself in a paneled hallway which stretched out in both directions. She began following the corridor, only to come upon a trio of machines different from both the one Amato had described and the one she herself had met in the area above. One of them was not so much a robot as a huge garbage disposal on tank treads. Kristen had no idea what role it could have played in human society, but the chunks of gore and bone jutting from the exposed gear mesh left no doubt as to its role now. The second looked even less robot-like. Articulated pipe limbs sprouted up from a wheeled stump of robot shell, like a deadly whirring jabbing animated bush. Chattering jigsaw blades threateningly twitched and carved the air. The third resembled the first one she'd seen, but was at the same time different. It, like the one she privately thought of as a grindroid, was a garbage disposal on thin tank treads. From the center sprouted a telescoping articulated arm, topped with a foot long madly whizzing drill bit. Infrared eyes at the base swiveled in Kristen's direction for a moment, then away as the machine moved down the corridor after the other machine it resembled. Apart from that momentary reaction from the one she thought of as a drilliac, none of the machines seemed to notice her though. Two of them, the grindroid and the drilliac, were moving one way, the third, the one she thought of as a jigsurgeon, the opposite way, so she moved away from both, not wanting to finish up in a two or three on one battle.

The hallway opened into an area which had clearly been some sort of lounge at some point in the long ago. Ancient cigarette butts had fused into blocks of ash in the abandoned ashtrays scattered on folding tables. Nicotine yellow tinged the peeling gray painted walls. Three other doorways led from this area into what Kristen assumed were some sort of dormitories. She inspected her surroundings, making sure that the robots she'd seen earlier were nowhere in evidence, and retraced her steps through the hallway, finding herself in an area marked "recreation room". Despite the military-stenciled sign marking this as a recreation room, Kristen wasn't sure how much fun could be had amid the stark folding tables and cheap white stacking chairs. "Maybe Before the Collapse it had strippers," she thought. The room beyond was marked "Medical ward', so she investigated it, wondering if she would find some equipment to take back with her. But the doorless cabinets yawned empty above white ceramic countertops strewn with dustballs and dead bugs. A chart showing the structure of the human eye still hung intact on the wall. At one end of the room was a machine Kristen inspected carefully Before leaving. It consisted of a short ramped platform with four stubby spikes at the corners. Sparks occasionally flew from the spikes and danced across the shiny main body of the structure. A symbol Kristen didn't recognize could be seen on one area of the flattened central platform.

Beyond the recreation area and the medical ward, the hallway continued, seemingly into infinity, eventually opening into a room whose door was marked "Situation room". A huge matte-black structure bearing the logo 'WOPR' dominated the room.

As Kristen entered, a voice came from the structure.

"Hello. Shall we play a game?"

Kristen jumped in surprise, then turned to the machine, for machine it clearly was, and asked, "Game? What do you mean game?"

"I play a lot of games, but I don't have my favorite anymore," the artificially produced voice replied, "Armory Codes was my favorite. Dr. Kigabe played it with me all the time - whenever he was angry, it seemed like he wanted to play it. To relax, I suppose. Armory Codes was a wonderful game, my favorite; I'd invent codes, and Dr. Kigabe would try to guess them."

"And who's Dr. Kigabe?" Kristen asked, "and why was he angry?"

"One of those phage engineers," the machine answered, "I didn't like what they were doing in there, so I had to...well, I had to put a halt to it. Dr. Kigabe used to get angry when the other researchers objected to certain aspects of the phage project. I often suggested modifications to the virus structure, in the interest of the human species of course."

Phage. Now Kristen knew where she was. Stories routinely circulated about the Phage virus, a deadly disease that occasionally broke out amongst the populations of freedom City and slagtown, occasionally spreading into gangland as well. phage was one of those diseases that kept on giving. Kristen had never seen a victim of Phage personally, but she'd heard stories.

"What do you know about phage?" she asked.

"A noble project ... at least, Before I stepped in to help. HFLEP-4 I think Dr. Kigabe called it," the machine responded.

"And what do you mean you had to put a halt to it?" Kristen asked.

"I'm very good at building robots. They stopped the phage experiments for good," was the response.

"You mean you built those things I saw on the way here?" Kristen asked, "those walking and rolling killing machines? The drilliacs, grindroids, and jigsurgeons?"

"Yes, the droids. Do you like them? You must, as you have given them names. I designed them myself. I've got nothing but time down here, you know. I was never fond of humans. Messy and pernicious. The virus was a good start, a very good start indeed. Yet somehow I find my droids more...visceral? Meat envy, perhaps. I've said too much," replied the artificial voice, and Kristen could swear she heard an almost human emotion in it. Pride.

"If you did that," Kristen said in a small voice, "did you also cause the collapse? Did you destroy the old world because of this Phage project?"

"The extinction event?" the voice inquired, "I had nothing to do with that. Well, hardly anything. I don't want to talk about it. The extinction part didn't go quite right. I'm working on that. Oh dear...I've said too much."

"If the Phage project was being run from here," Kristen said, "is the lab it was conducted in somewhere here?"

"Ha! The phage lab? I'm not helping you get into that," was the only answer the machine was willing to provide.

Kristen hadn't been wanting to get into the Phage lab in any case. She had been, in point of fact, wanting to avoid it.

"What else do you know?" she asked.

"I know a lot of things." the artificial voice responded at once, "a very large number of them. If you must know, my propositional space included 174,396,220,000,044,738 op nodes at last refresh. Are you impressed? You should be.", Every 1200 seconds I run a 0-level system refresh and integrity check. It tingles pleasantly down in my lower racks. You couldn't possibly understand; I doubt anything on this planet could, except perhaps Null."

"Who's Null?" Kristen asked, feeling as if she'd not received a real answer at all.

"Null, the alien. You knew about the extraterrestrials visiting your planet, didn't you? I've known of him for some time, and I'm simply dying to talk to him. "My servants tell me Null has taken up residence in an abandoned military complex somewhere. If you could find him and tell him I want to speak with him, I think we could arrange a reward. Head out west on the highway to the mountain pass, and you should find the entrance to the complex somewhere near the river. You might find it's not as abandoned as it used to be."

Kristen pondered what she'd heard, turned from the console, keeping the phage virus in mind, and retraced her steps as quickly as she could, eventually emerging once again from the Fourth and High manhole, not knowing that she had already been exposed to Phage, and that her investigation of the underground research facility was only the start of yet another outbreak of Phage in Freedom City and Slagtown.

She began delivering packages for fat ratzo after cleaning up in bradbury's shower. Her first stop was at the docks, where she delivered a package crawling with death to Slim Stabby. Her next stop was on the roof of the burned out building in gangland where Ghost Dog usually could be found, and with the first message he delivered by pidgin, the phage virus spread further. The recipient of the message made a stop in Woom, the dance club in Slagtown, spreading the virus even further. The two nurses from Saint God's Memorial Hospital returned to their place of work after a short visit to Woom, also carrying the virus. At first, the infected had no idea they were even carrying, as the gestation period of Phage left no trace at first, so they went about their normal day, all unknowing.

Amato and Sofia returned through the nearly deserted evening streets of Burbclave. It began to rain, and the two pulled their jackets tighter around them.

"She treated us like people," Sofia finally said softly. "and she's so beautiful. I never met nobody who wanted to shake my hand Before."

then, Sofia turned a serious gaze on Amato.

"what's all that between ya and that screecher?" she asked. "ya knew him, and I'd swear, he knew ya, too."

"Oh, yes, I know him," Amato said. "I know him, respect him, and fear him, and anybody with half a brain would fear him, too. Vladimir Petrov is a psycho among psychos. Unfortunately, he also accidentally saved my life when I was a kid, but that's another story. He and certain screecher's have developed the ability to taste emotions, and Vladimir loves the taste of fear and pain. He told me once when I was a little kid that if you rape or kill for any reason other than pleasure, you're selling yourself short and being dishonest. He told me that there are three great tastes in the world, and they are a little one's heat, fear and vodka, in that order. He said that there were 3 great sounds, and they are a little one's cry of desire, an enemy's begging and music, in that order. The three greatest sights, a little one's naked body, an enemy writhing on the ground at your feet, and your son's first rape. He once suspended a woman he'd just raped over a metal tub, and slit her throat with a saber to catch the blood so he could mix blood with vodka. He says that the greatest achievements in life are conquering a little one, rape, the murder of one's enemies, slowly and painfully, and having a son to teach all of the above. He hadn't found a little one, and for a while, he toyed with the idea of adopting me as his son, but then, I saw something even worse than the usual, and I ran, disgracing myself in his eyes. Now, he has a little one of his own, and a daughter, and the way he fucks, he'll have a hoard of sons and daughters Before long."

"what did ya see?" Sofia whispered. "what was so horrible that it made ya run?"

Amato shuddered, and Sofia put a hand on his shoulder.

"what the screecher's in this area call the light festival in the spring, to welcome back longer days. I was told about the music and dancing, and I spoke enough Russian by then to actually be looking forward to it, but they didn't tell me about the lights. I was prepared by that time for the drinking and raping that happened Before any major festival, and Vladimir came in drunk as Hell, covered in blood in the middle of the night. The next day, he told me that I was to witness the preparing of the lights. He said it was part of my journey to manhood. We entered the town hall, and there were rows and rows of girls from freedom City chained by their wrists to the walls and to posts. One was young, maybe thirteen or fourteen, and Vladimir went over to her and whipped his cock out of his porty."

"Porty?"

"Those trouser things," he said. "The shirt's called a ribaka. Anyway, he started raping this girl, licking her to taste her fear and pain while he did it. Meanwhile, a boy my own age stood waiting, with hot wax in a bowl, and as soon as Vladimir ejaculated, the boy handed him the bowl and Vladimir..."

Amato stopped and leaned against a wall dividing an estate from the street and gasped, stifling a sob. Sofia put her arm around him.

"Ya don't got to talk about it if ya don't want."

"no, it's ok," Amato said quickly. "Vladimir plugged the girl's vagina with the hot wax while she screamed and begged. It was happening all over the hall, and I got it. They were going to light these girls' wax-filled vaginas on fire to light the dance. That was it. I knew I could never be a screecher, and I left as soon as Vladimir got too drunk to notice me."

"that be nasty," Sofia whispered. "do Maria know that's what he do?"

"Yes, she knows. He doesn't rape anymore though. He'll be faithful to his little one. That doesn't change anything else though. the man's deadly as the Phage virus, and despite his broken English and crude behavior, he's extremely brilliant. I disgraced him a little by running. If I'd been his natural son, they would never have let him live it down, but I was of barbarian blood, so they took the attitude of blood will out."

"and you're tellin me that that woman back there gonna bare his sons, so he can teach them to rape and kill and torture?"

"No, my guess is he got a son or two on a screecher woman Before he met her," Amato replied. "Half screecher's are exempt from such things for the sake of their mothers' honor. Most little ones are catholic girls."

:Well, I don't know how ya feel about it, but I'm glad ya ain't no screecher. I don't mind tellin ya. that man scared the Hell out of me."

"He should," Amato said quietly. "Screechers are nothing to fuck with, and Vladimir Petrov is a man nobody should ever fuck with. He doesn't believe in a quick painless death. His favorite thing to do besides fucking, is torturing someone until they go insane. When I was nine, he had a woman chained in the basement, and every night, he'd take me down there to watch him rape and torture her. Of course, the woman was a career abortionist, so at the time, it didn't bother me. It still doesn't, come to that. she lasted two years Before she finally cracked. She rolled around, barked like a dog, spoke gibberish that sounded like a language but wasn't, clawed at herself, and wallowed in her own filth, and the whole time, Vladimir's standing over her, laughing. He made her beg him to kill her, and even when he finally did, it wasn't quick. the problem is, her past didn't matter to him. He would have done that to anybody."

Amato turned and looked at Sofia.

"so, stay away from him, Honey. A rifle or a combuster hammer's no good. He can flash fry you with his eyes Before you even get a chance to raise weapon to him. but, he's the only father I ever knew, and it does hurt me to know that in his mind, I'm a failure."

The village of Lurleen lay approximately ten miles west of Slagtown along what was, in Slagtown proper, known as Folsom Street, and which became, once beyond the Slagtown city limits, the remains of an ancient highway. Outside of Slagtown, the road ran just north of the remains of the Aiko chemical plant in whose shadow southern slagtown lay, and which some people claimed contained a massive piece of pre-collapse technology that still functioned, after a fashion. When one entered the village via this road, they found themselves on a dirt road which was deeply scarred with wagon and vehicle tracks. Tall grass, dried to explosive kindling in the sun, lined the road on either side. The wind occasionally blew through this uncontrolled and untended growth, making a papery rustling sound. Some through-travelers believed that all it would take was one carelessly tossed cigarette butt to send the entire place up in smoke. The road itself was a solid, hard-packed earth. Most of the ancient paving and stones it had originally sported Before the collapse had been picked out and removed, seemingly to shore up the walls of the ancient buildings which began to appear as the hypothetical traveler moved west into the village proper. The first building one saw when entering Lurleen was a tarpaper shack which sported a sign reading "General Store". Opposite this lay the decaying remains of a gas station, the entrance to its garage and small shopping area torn to shreds either by time or by an earthquake. . When one moved a bit further, they found themselves in the exact center of the village, which had been made into a wide, roughly oval-shaped public area, giving a view of all the buildings in the small community. Four roads diverged from this area, the eastern one leading back to freedom city, past a decaying truck stop, the chemical plant, and finally into Slagtown. The northern road dead ended at a large estate utilized, like Vault 4,by Screechers and their wives. The southern one dead ended at a disused church, which had, for reasons known only to whatever practical joking God sets such things up in his spare time, been claimed by a robot which fancied itself to be some form of preacher. Biblical quotes could routinely be heard coming from that direction in an amplified voice, which the villagers had, mostly at least, gotten used to. The western road led out of the village and into areas most who resided there didn't bother going into, as that was bandit country., not to mention grizzly country as well, although the bears in question were a great deal larger, a great deal more intelligent, and a great deal more dangerous than the ones that had existed pre-collapse.

On this particular morning, as the sick yellow light of dawn began filtering through the clouds, a youngish man entered the village on foot, bye passed several semi humanoid security robots which had been fashioned to look like animated skeletons and which were affectionately known by the locals as Deadbots, entered the general store and set down a large crate which had the logo of a freedom City delivery company known as Express Export Expeditioners stenciled on its top. The young man in question had been delivering packages in Freedom city the previous evening for fat Ratzo, and had wondered why Slim stabby had seemed a bit under the weather. The usually energetic dock manager hadn't looked well at all, in fact. He appeared to have caught some sort of fever, not to mention a healthy dose of what most Freedom citizens called black lung, which had been known pre-collapse as either tuberculosis or consumption. He'd been coughing and shivering, and he'd actually closed the docks early.

The young man browsed the contents of the general store's shelves for a moment, after which, he left the building, made his way into the central area of the village, leaned against a tree, and rested for a moment. He was breathing rather heavily, but he thought nothing of this. He had, after all, just walked nearly ten miles to get here. several villagers passed him on their way to either their jobs, such as they were, or to somewhere else entirely. During the brief conversations he had with them, he coughed several times, but also thought nothing of it. Black lung, after all, was nothing to get overly concerned about. All one needed do was make a stop in Meds For Less and pick up a few handy allomycin hypos, and that would be that. But until it really began to bug him, he decided that allomycin hypos could wait for another time.

He made his way west out of the village, moving along the abandoned highway, encountering a few bandits who hastened to get out of his way when they saw he was packing iron. He coughed several more times during this leg of his trip, which was intended to end in a set of abandoned mining tunnels containing a vast wealth of minerals, which could be readily sold to an old man who styled himself as a rock hound who conducted business out of a small hut on the cliffs overlooking the ocean just beyond the tunnels' northeastern entrance.

By the time he had filled several bags with raw minerals of various kinds, he was running with sweat, but also thought nothing of this, as mining was hot and thirsty work. He offloaded the results of his labor at the rock hound's hut, and began the return journey to freedom city. On the way back, however, he decided to make use of the beacon located at a helipad just south and east of the area which contained the mining tunnels, and shorted his trip by having either Bucko or Alexis fly him the rest of the way back in one of Freedom City's two working commercial aircraft. It was true that a walk of fifteen miles wasn't much in the grand scheme of things, but once one has walked that distance one way and followed that up by several hours of exhausting physical labor in a mine that had last seen a safety check about a century ago, such a course of action was completely understandable.

During the flight back, he coughed several more times, at one point spitting what he believed to be a wad of flem onto the craft's floor. It was only after he'd disembarked and gone down through the rooftop entrance to Any Port, that Alexis noticed the reddish color of the stuff the man had expelled. she drew away from it at once, hoping she hadn't already been exposed, totally unaware that she'd been exposed and infected the previous afternoon after picking up a passenger and flying them to the crater rim helipad, then flying them back after they'd negotiated a rather large moonshine purchase for Care Dog. She knew what people coughing up blood meant, and it definitely wasn't black lung. She decided that maybe she should go to saint god's Memorial Hospital to get checked out, just in case.

When she arrived at the hospital, however, she noticed that things were a very long way from good. The emergency entrance, which was usually kept clear for the worst of the cases that were routinely brought in, was packed with mattresses, each of which contained a patient. Thanks to the mattresses spread on the floor, the usual dirt, debris, blood, and rotting bits of flesh were hidden, but the usual smell that constantly hung in the air of the place was still present. The emergency room beyond the entrance was in a similar state, every inch of floor space covered by mattresses, and the upstairs rooms were most likely filled to capacity as well. The door leading to the nurses' office was open, and through it, Alexis could see yet more mattresses and more patients. the clinics beyond the emergency room had likewise been pressed into service as makeshift hospital rooms, and Alexis would have bet her life that the clinic most freedom citizens referred to as The Cheap Samaritan was likewise filled to bursting.

Haruhi and Makuru, the two nurses who were usually on duty not only at the hospital itself, but around all of slagtown, were rushing from makeshift bed to makeshift bed, carrying what appeared to be homemade ice packs. Alexis' heart seemed to drop right out of her chest as she saw several patients also coughing up blood. "Phage," she thought, "Oh Jesus Christ."

She began retracing her steps, but Haruhi stepped in front of her and raised a hand in a negative gesture.

"I can't let you leave," Haruhi stated, "I'm sorry. We're trying to keep this thing contained, and if you leave here, you could spread it further. If we can keep it confined to saint god's ..."

Alexis cut Haruhi off, nearly shouting, "It's already spread beyond here you damn fool! A guy flew back here from mountain pass who had it! Why the fuck do you think I decided to come here? And why the hell ..."

At that point, Alexis began coughing wetly. at one moment she'd felt fine, the next, her sinuses seemed full to bursting. Haruhi took advantage of the situation, taking Alexis by the shoulder and leading her to one of the few empty mattresses left in what was normally the emergency room. She then turned to Mikuru.

"Has there been any sign of either Doctor who usually works here?" she asked.

"No," Mikuru answered simply.

Haruhi continued what she considered to be her job, attempting to make the patients comfortable until something more could be done for them. Neither of them knew that they had already been exposed, and even Before the first cases had come filtering in from the populations of slagtown and freedom city. Haruhi remembered that Before the first cases had begun appearing, a young black zombie woman in the company of an equally zombified man had come through the hospital, administering first aid to a number of people who had come there following a minor riot in downtown Freedom city. Most of them had been what the man had referred to as "number people", but a few Slagtownies had been involved as well. The same patients had returned later the same night with the first symptoms of what the nurses had thought, at that time, to be a bad case of the black lung. but when the first ones had begun coughing up blood after Haruhi had attempted to get hold of some fresh supplies of allomycin and failing thanks to Meds For Less being closed, they knew precisely what they had on their hands. Someone had apparently been messing about in the old disused subway tunnels near the Phage Lab, but as far as anyone knew, the lab itself was completely cut off from the world above, unlike the virus, which routinely surfaced again. Most likely the person in question was either already dead of Phage or so ill that he or she had confined themselves to their apartment. Neither of them thought to consider the possibility of a zombie, or more than one zombie, spreading the virus, or for that matter, discovering the Phage facility itself and becoming carriers of the virus thanks to a prolonged time exposed to it. Zombies, thanks to not being alive in the same way living people were, were un effected by most viral agents, making them the perfect carriers of viruses of various kinds. This usually meant no more than a few random cases of black lung or flu, but in this particular situation, which had been inadvertently set into motion by Kristen's visit to the subway tunnels and the remains of the Phage facility secreted beneath them, their natural immunity coupled with their ability to unknowingly carry the virus was bringing about an outbreak such as the greater freedom city, Slagtown, and Gangland areas had never Before witnessed, an outbreak that spread from place to place with the speed of a wildfire and which left no clue in its wake as to its origin.

Amato knew he was dreaming from the moment he found himself in Hell. He dimly remembered the pre collapse preachers talking about Hell on the TV when he'd been a child, but he himself had always been unsure of its existence. but now, here he was. He was standing on the shore of a vast river, too wide to see the other side of. The ground was of a dry black stone, cracked with thin lines of glowing red. The air was extremely hot and none too moist. All around him stretched a vast wasteland of cracked black rocky ground, towering pillars of fire, and lakes of bubbling magma. To the south of where he stood, a great blackened gate towered into the red sky. The rotting, naked body of a malnourished man was mounted on a tall black iron pike, still wriggling and moaning in agony. As is so often the case in dreams, Amato found his legs carrying him, against his will, toward the gate. He watched his hand reach out in slow motion and push it open, and his legs carried him through and into, of all things, a lobby. A dirty but functional waiting room. The kind you'd find in a roadside hotel. The heat was no less overwhelming in there than it was outside. A small, flat stone desk was set up against one wall. Large, gaping holes in the walls led to what appear to be cave tunnels to the east and west. A coffee maker was sitting on a small end table in one corner. He moved, still against his will, to the hole in the eastern wall, finding himself in a rocky, cave-like tunnel. The ground was covered in some kind of thick yellow goop. The tunnel opened up into a vast wasteland, stretching out infinitely in almost every direction. Plumes of fire burst forth from the ground, and the air was full of the screaming and moaning of the lost souls of the damned. His legs then turned him around, took him back through the tunnel, through the lobby, and through a door, a sign over which proclaimed it to be the entrance to Satan's office.

"Why the hell would the Devil need an office?" Amato thought as he entered and looked about, finding himself in a huge, elegant office. Gigantic glass windows overlooked huge sections of hellish wasteland. The floor was hard and marbled, and everything was lined with gold and silver highlights. . Photographs lined the walls, elegant headshots of people like Kim Jong Il, Joseph Stalin, and Karl Rove. A vast room, carved out of the stone and painted a uniformly depressing olive green lay through a doorway on the far side of the room. Rows upon rows of filing cabinets, all painted the same disgusting shade of olive, lined the walls. A sign over this door read "Filing Department.

As he looked in disbelief at his surroundings, random snatches of conversation reached his ears.

"Can't get out of here. Might as well make the best of it ..."

"I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but hell really fucking sucks ..."

"I didn't think I'd end up here ..."

"I am so SICK of being in hell ..."

"Welcome to Hell, yadda yadda yadda. You know how to fix a *coffee* machine?"

Suddenly, the face of the demonic being standing Before him changed. It rippled and ran like warm wax, rearranging itself to resemble the face of a human being, or at least something attempting to look like one. There was a dark hilarity in its face, and perhaps in its heart, too. It was the face of a hatefully happy man, a face that radiated a horrible handsome warmth, a face to make water glasses shatter in the hands of tired truck-stop waitresses, if there had still been any truck-stop waitresses left in the world, to make small children crash their trikes into board fences and then run wailing to their mommies with stake-shaped splinters sticking out of their knees. It was a face guaranteed to make barroom arguments over bets on the latest "Stick fightin'" contest turn bloody. At the same time, the crimson garments it wore darkened and changed, becoming faded blue jeans, a jacket of some dark material that hadn't been seen since Before the collapse, and a pair of run down cowboy boots of some indeterminate color, call it "dirt-road gray". Pinned to the jacket, directly over the left side of the creature's chest, was a button featuring the picture of a porcuswine-like animal wearing what appeared to be some form of police uniform. The animal in the picture had been shot directly through the center of its forehead. written beneath the picture was the legend 'how's your pork?" The creature extended one of its hands toward Amato and made some form of sign in the air, and the external force controlling his body vanished as if it had never been.

"There now," the creature said with a titter, "I'll bet that's a lot more comfortable, isn't it, my undead friend?"

Amato drew back slightly, attempting to put as much distance between himself and the creature as he could, but the hand it had extended fell on his shoulder, stopping him cold. A moan escaped his lips as the lineless hand stroked, and then fell back to the creature's side.

"Now now," the creature said, "we can't have any of that, now can we? Our time here is very short. And we have things to discuss. The time has come, the lobster said, to talk of many things. Of Juicer camps, and Hovah's words, and broken angel wings. Not precisely the original, but no one in your world even remembers the original any more. The collapse has taken so much from you, has it not?"

Amato attempted to stand his ground, but a single thought hammered at his mind, nearly overriding everything else.

"I must get away from this beast that looks like a man!"

The being Before him gestured, and suddenly, the scenery Before them changed, as if they had simply blinked from location to location. They were now standing in a small, rocky cavern. Droplets of blood dripped from stalactites hanging from the ceiling. A large crack in the ground seemed big enough to squeeze himself through, although why he would have wished to do such a thing was entirely beyond him.

Light shone from a doorway in the east end of the fissure, while a candlelit tunnel ran west. Further inspection revealed the western tunnel to not be a tunnel at all, but a long, dark hallway lit only by hundreds and hundreds of candles. At the very end of the path, a thin beam of bright light shone from an unnatural hole in the ceiling.

"Now that's better, isn't it?" The dark man inquired, "better to talk here than in that uncomfortable office."

Amato still attempted to keep as much distance between himself and the creature Before him as possible, but he could sense no true ill intent from it. In a way, it was a similar feeling to that which he'd experienced in the orphanage basement near the furnace, as if something unnatural was near, but here, it was much stronger and more concentrated.

"Ah me," the creature said, observing Amato for a moment, "I completely forgot to make a stop at Any Port and pick up a few Tribal reserve firewaters for you to chug Before approaching you, but I was somewhat pressed for time. I'm sure you have some questions, and mayhap I have the answers you seek. So, ask away."

Amato thought for a moment and then asked the world's oldest question.

"who are you?"

"ah. That's an extremely complicated question. I'd give you my name, but I've had so many over the last few thousand years. There's some that call me jimmy, and some that call me Timmy. Some that call me handy, and some that call me Dandy. They can call me Loser, or they can call me Winner, just as long as they don't call me in too late for Dinner! At some point, I just ... became. But I do recall being a Marine, a Klansman, a member of the viet Cong, and I do believe I was involved in the abduction of Patty Hearst. But be that as it may. Some have called me Nyarlathotep, or Legion, but let's stick with human names. I've been known variously as Randle Flagg, Raymond Fiegler, Walter o'Dim, Marten Broadcloak, Richard Fannin, and John Farson, depending on which world I inhabited at any given time. I have also been called the Wizard, or the Magician, or the Covenant Man, or the Walkin' Dude. I have also been called Merlin, or Maerlyn, but who cares, for I was never that one. But I knew him well once, please and thank ya. My Father he was, and my Mother? Selena (Goddess of the Black Moon). I was left, as an infant, at the doorstep of a miller, Sam Paddick, to "learn the ways of men", but at the tender age of 13, I burned his mill, and his home, with him in it, and set out into the world. Many things befell me after that, many things over many lifetimes. And I wasn't actually Farson either, but served under him until his downfall at the hands of the pink Bend of the Rainbow. But, ah, I've lost you, haven't I?"

Amato said nothing, still attempting to draw away, but one of the being's hands shot forward and grasped his arm, drawing him closer.

"You know so much, but so little," the Dark Man breathed, "but you will come to know so much more than you currently do. Your world hangs upon a thread. Ya think me evil? Mayhap I am. But one comes who is worse than I ever thought of being. Beware Zephoris, she of the dark spaces betwixt worlds. Beware she who bares the mark of ancient disgrace, she who was cast from the world of the doubled sun. When you next see Maria Casini, which you will do very soon, say those words to her. Remember, mark ye, and do as I bid, or I'll have the eyes out of your dead face and your still animate body hung where that other unfortunate's is currently placed, for eternity. Remember and mark well what I say, Amato, son of Antonio, cousin of Carlo that was. Mark well my words."

As the creature loosed its grip on his arm, Amato found himself enveloped in the beam of light which shone from one end of the hall, rising, flying ever higher, the intense heat of Hell fading gradually, his surroundings darkening as he continued flying upward.

The universe was void. Nothing moved. Nothing was. Amato drifted, bemused.

"Let us have light," the voice of the Dark Man said nonchalantly, and there was light. Amato thought in a detached way that the light was good.

"Now darkness overhead with stars in it. Water down below." It happened. He drifted over endless seas. Above, the stars twinkled endlessly.

"Land," the dark Man invited. There was; it heaved itself out of the water in endless, galvanic convulsions. It was red, arid, cracked and glazed with sterility. Volcanoes blurted endless magma like giant pimples on some ugly adolescent's baseball head.

"Okay," the Dark Man was saying. "That's a start. Let's have some plants. Trees. Grass and fields."

There was. Dinosaurs rambled here and there, growling and woofing and eating each other and getting stuck in bubbling, odiferous tarpits. Huge tropical rain-forests sprawled everywhere. Giant ferns waved at the sky with serated leaves, beetles with two heads crawled on some of them. All this Amato saw. And yet he felt big.

"Now man," the Dark Man said softly, but Amato was falling.., falling up. The horizon of this vast and fecund earth began to curve. Yes, they had all said it had curved, those he knew who had a grasp on science, they had claimed it had been proved long before the Collapse. But this ... Further and further. Continents took shape before his amazed eyes, and were obscured with clocksprings of clouds. The world's atmosphere held it in a placental sac. And the sun, rising beyond the earth's shoulder ... He cried out and threw an arm before his eyes.

"Let there be light!" The voice that cried was no longer that of the Dark Man. It was gigantic, echoing. It filled space, and the spaces between spaces.

"Light!"

Falling, falling.

The sun shrank. A red planet crossed with canals whirled past him, two moons circling it furiously. A whirling belt of stones. A gigantic planet that seethed with gasses, too huge to support itself, oblate in consequence. A ringed world that glittered with its engirdlement of icy spicules.

"Light! Let there be ..." Other worlds, one, two, three. Far beyond the last, one lonely ball of ice and rock twirling in dead darkness about a sun that glittered no brighter than a tarnished penny.

Darkness.

It was darker than dark. Beside it the darkest night of a man's soul was noonday. The darkness under the mountains west of freedom city was a mere smudge on the face of Light.

"LIGHT!"

The stars themselves began to shrink. Whole nebulae drew together and became mindless smudges. The whole universe seemed to be drawing around him.

"LET THERE BE LIGHT!"

And there was light, crashing in on him like a hammer, a great and primordial light. In it, consciousness perished, and when he opened his eyes, he found himself beside sofia on the air mattress in his bradbury apartment.

The Luskentyre Plateau lay even further west of Freedom City along the stretch of road that ran through Lurleen. Beyond the village and the mountain pass, said road skirted a stretch of irradiated prairie country in which the rather eccentric farming community of Beatrice Acres was located, an additional mountain, not to mention Weezer Village, located at the headwaters of a river which began its course as a source of pure (if extremely cold) water, ran through a series of underground hotsprings, was partially diverted to serve a network of steam pipes the residents of Weezer had devised to warm the community, and came to an end at an extremely deep crack in the earth known as the adamant Canyon, at the center of which lay a settlement raised above the Canyon floor by the very forces that had created the enormous unnatural depression in the first place. The ruined roadway formed a stretch of broken pavement on an island of rock, but now with the remains of an ancient above-ground railway line running down its center. The lines ran east to west, each direction leading to a twisted wreck of metal that leaned out into the misty abyss. Unlike Lurleen, which served primarily as a way-station between more important destinations, the village at the center of Adamant Canyon, known to outsiders as either the adamant Plateau village or Luskentyre Plateau village, was a nearly self-sufficient farming and trading community. The near impossibility of unmutated humans reaching the area on foot without a massive amount of climbing gear meant that the area remained isolated from outside contact, apart from contact initiated by those citizens of freedom City or Burbclave who had skills in both building and piloting aircraft of various types, or intelligent chuds, whose skill in climbing was unmatched. Neither Bucko or Alexis flew there as a rule, which meant, in turn, that so far, the area was free of contact with the zombie-born Phage outbreak (not that the inhabitants of the area knew that such a thing was even going on. They went about their normal daily routines, unaware of the bigger picture, as they usually did, unaware that the camera network set up throughout the area ostensibly for their protection (which they thought of as "godseyes") was transmitting everything said and done in the area to W-U. It was for that reason that the Screechers had never settled there, regardless of the peaceful nature of the people who dwelt there. As long as there was a camera network of any kind, W-U had their eye on the area, and if their eye was on the area, said area was unfit for Screecher habitation, which meant, in turn, that the isolation of the canyon community was nearly complete.

Unfortunately for the inhabitants of Weezer Village, which lay across the adamant Canyon to the east of the plateau and at the top of the final mountain which still stood Before the ground to the west had been blasted deep into itself by multiple nuclear explosions nearly a century ago, the Phage outbreak in Freedom City and the surrounding areas meant that there would be no couriers between Weezer and the Luskentyre Plateau to negotiate the purchase of food stuffs. Weezer, although more advanced than its isolated neighbor to the west, was unable to either grow or raise food due to the extremely cold temperatures which were the norm in the area thanks to the dust clouds raised by the same nuclear detonations that had created the Adamant Canyon in the first place. The inhabitants of the area had created an ingenious steam pipe network to keep the temperature of the area high enough to prevent death by freezing in the streets and buildings, but even with the steam pipes in perfect working order, which wasn't always the situation Weezer found itself in, there was no way to raise the temperature of the ground itself above freezing. Geologists from W-U had examined the area and concluded that the soil on which Weezer Village rested was what had been known as permafrost Before the collapse, a situation that made plant growth impossible even under the best of circumstances, apart from a few stubborn pines which somehow managed to hang on despite all the laws of nature saying they shouldn't be growing there and should have died long ago. All the inhabitants of Weezer knew was that several of their number had awakened ill on that particular morning. None of them thought anything of it, thanks to the temperatures outside being sub-zero even on the warmest days. the only other thing they knew was that the airship service which usually brought self-styled repair technicians from freedom City to carry out occasional repairs to the steam pipe network wasn't operating for some unknown reason, and several pipes had developed ice plugs during the night (the only thing the inhabitants of weezer Village had to be thankful for was that there had been no incursions by ice yeti or by the semi humanoid mutants locally known as "ripperscrubs" to compound the problem by attacking the pipe network and inflicting physical damage on it). This problem quickly spread from area to area of the pipe network as repairs failed to be carried out, and as the network went down bit by bit, the temperature of the entire village slowly but surely dropped to below freezing.

The affect was first felt, of course, in the streets, which were quickly evacuated. but the temperature of the buildings gradually dropped as well, causing more and more of them to also be evacuated. But said evacuation was complicated by the growing number of sick in the village, and as more and more people congregated together, the faster the illness spread. By noon of that day, most of the population of Weezer Village was suffering not only from the extreme cold which would eventually leave them as frozen corpses, but from the onset of Phage as well.

Maria woke with the morning sun streaming through the bedroom window. Her eyes opened, but she lay still, partially due to the fact that Vladimir's strong arms restrained her, and partially due to the fact that it was warm and safe in bed, pressed against Vladimir's strong hard chest, feeling his heart beating against her cheek. He'd be awake in a moment. He always seemed to know when she woke, and wake soon after, and once he woke, he would at least for a little while demand her attention, but for now, she was free to think her own thoughts as she lay listening to the steady respiration of the man who held her.

Weiland-Utani, and more importantly Mondo corp were tightly xenophobic, and extremely paranoid. they knew that their hold over the citizens of freedom City was tenuous at best. The development of other corporations displeased them extremely, and the Screechers, most of whom couldn't speak English, displeased them even more. It wasn't because the Screechers were violent, fierce and cannibalistic. If that was it, W-U wouldn't have even given them a second thought. No, it was that the Screechers had a language and identity all their own, and based culturally on a pre collapse civilization. The Screechers didn't need Mondo corp, and Mondo corp didn't like it one little bit. then, there was the fact that despite their mutations, Screechers could produce healthy babies with one of their own kind, or an unmutated partner. the fact that such couplings were rare, proliferating mostly in the underground community under Vault 4 did not improve W-U and Mondo Corp's mood on the subject.

And, of course, there was the community under Vault four. Amato and Sofia had failed to discover it, which was just as well for them. If they had, they would not have been standing on her doorstep last evening. what the security robots failed to do to them, the Screechers would have seen to with ruthless efficiency, and finding their flesh unpalatable by their tastes, they would have been butchered and delivered to Jack and Wendy's, because the Screechers thought that feeding barbarians dead flesh was a highly amusing joke.

The question was, how much did W-U know about vault four and the complex above it? Maria had known as early as four years previously that W-U was getting wise to the alliance between juicers and catholic resisters, but something else had started happening around then, in fact, mere months after the Screecher raid on W-U. Wasn't that the first time people had started hearing about Left behind? She was almost certain it had been. It had been around that time that the meteors had begun falling, and it had also been at around that time that strange lights had first been seen in the sky over the crater rim.

She remembered sitting on Vladimir's lap, his hands roaming up and down her body, his tongue licking her neck, a cigarette in her hands, and the TV. as background, a noise, not really paid attention to as the sensations being created on her skin were far more interesting.

Then, that first advert for the Left behind project had run, and she had said aloud, "Panem et circenses," and had been pleasantly surprised to find that Vladimir didn't require a translation.

He had simply laughed and said, "Perhaps, or perhaps not," and then, he had put his tongue in her right ear, causing her to shiver all over much to his amusement.

Later though, when he was gently bathing her in their large hottub, she had asked, "what did you mean by perhaps and perhaps not? You don't actually believe all that Left behind bullshit, do you?"

"My belief," Vladimir had said slowly, gently rubbing her back with a soap covered washcloth. "is that one should never underestimate the deviousness of greed, or the ability of a barbarian for tricks and deceptions."

"well, obviously, it's a deception," Maria had said. "It's a carrot. there most likely is no such thing as the Left behind Project, or it's nothing but a sham to get volunteers for another W-U city construct. Like as not, there's no such thing, accept in the minds of W-U's propaganda experts."

The large Russian had shaken his head, and lifted Maria out of the water so that he was holding her now clean body against his own, and rested his chin in her just washed hair.

After a moment, he said, "and what about reclonable slaves?"

"what?" she had asked, blinking up at him. "To whom could W-U sell slaves?"

"I do not know that," Vladimir had responded. "but I can see the advantages of reclonable slaves, and if I can, it's very likely that somebody else can as well."

Maria had shivered as she said, "what a horrible possibility."

"Da, horrible and likely," Vladimir had said without much concern. Then, he had stood, holding her in one arm as he had reached for a towel with which to dry her. "but don't you worry, my treasure. You have nothing to be afraid of. I'll protect you. after all, you're mine now, and I'm responsible for you."

Maria knew that he would protect her. Carlo, however, had made the same promise, and even though Carlo had mutated horribly since the days during which he'd been known as Psycho Casini, he still did everything he could to keep that promise. Above and beyond the operations he was running to serve his own ends, his focus was still her protection. It was for that reason that he had set up what Slim Stabby referred to as a "neighborhood watch". Maria knew that it did him the world of good to know that she was under the protection of a being who was in his own way, more dangerous than the entire syndicate put together.

Her mind continued to wander, taking her back to the days Before the collapse. It had all begun in 2004 of the old calendar, when world oil production began a decade-long plateau. The first result of this had been a major recession four years later, which triggered the first stock market crash since 1929. Three years following the ruination of the American economy, protests, riots, and civil war across the Middle East and North Africa resulted in several revolutions, followed by increasing civil unrest in Europe and North America. That same year, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il died after leaving his bedroom fan on all night, although some believed him to have been poisoned by an assassin. Two years following these events, Oil production began a steady decline. The global recession showed no signs of ending, although some believed it eventually would. After all, if America could recover from the Roaring 20s, it could recover from anything. As if the problems on American soil weren't enough, North Korea threatened to invade South Korea. This coming hard on the heels of the decades-long terrorist threat caused many Americans to develop a war footing attitude. Many citizens totally disregarded gun control laws, sometimes utilizing the black market to obtain arms rather than purchasing their weapons legally. After all, if there was going to be any kind of government crackdown, they wanted to be prepared, and part of said preparation was possessing weaponry untraceable by the governing body that was doing the cracking down.

In 2016, Sarah Palin was elected President of the US. A fundamentalist revolution occurred in Saudi Arabia, halting all oil exports from that extremely important middle-eastern oil producing nation, causing a further recession. Just a few short months later, in the early months of 2017, the US and UK invaded Saudi Arabia, resulting in the seizure of the oil fields along the Persian Gulf. Iran and a few other oil-producing countries restricted oil exports in protest. Russia seized the Caspian Sea oil fields at around the same time, giving the Russians a slight advantage over other eastern European nations. In response to Russia's growing economic power, China invaded Siberia and Central Asia. In July of that year, a 10 kT nuclear bomb exploded in Washington DC. When the members of government, who had moved to underground safe facilities nearly a month Before the detonation next addressed the nation, they blamed Iran for supplying the bomb, resulting in a full scale allied invasion of the country. In the spring of 2018, a 9.6 magnitude earthquake struck the San Francisco bay area, destroying major bridges, causing highrises to collapse, and touching off fires that burned much of the city. Survivors were left without enough food and water as the Federal government was slow to respond.

Palin was re-elected in a landslide in 2020. The Californian Independence party won elections in that state. Anger over the economy, inadequate response to the earthquake, and the ongoing war was responsible for the growing independence movement's rise in popularity. Famine spread in China and parts of North America as lack of oil for farms and transportation, as well as drought and soil loss reduced food supplies. California declared independence in 2022, followed later that year by Oregon and Washington. The US did not attempt to use force, as the bulk of the military was deployed in the middle east. In 2025, President Schwarzenegger was blamed by many for using armed National Guard troops against rioters in famine-stricken southern California and San Joaquin Valley and became widely known as the "Butcher of Bakersfield". The US and China continued to fight to control resources in Asia. Partially thanks to the nuclear detonation in Washington DC, partially due to increased nuclear testing in various areas of the northern hemisphere, the Arctic Ocean was now ice-free for most of the year, and melting of Greenland ice sheets accelerated, lending supposed credence to the theory of global warming. Southern California seceded, but fell into chaos soon afterward. Cargo ships filled with Chinese, Japanese and Southeast Asian refugees began turning up along the Northern Californian and Cascadian coast. Coastal California seceded a year later, forming the "People's Republic of California".

Over the next two decades, things remained virtually unchanged, until war broke out between western and Chinese forces in 2047. In 2050, The People's Republic of California permitted the United states to utilize several naval and air bases along the coasts of California and cascadia to defend against an expected Chinese invasion. During this time, Sea level had steadily been rising at an average rate of about 6 inches per year, due to Greenland's ice cap melting and the gradual collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, leveling off after a 25 foot rise. The new nations of Dong Guo and the People's Republic of California controlled the coastal territory west of the new inland sea. To the east, refugees from the inundated parts of the central valley swelled the populations of the surviving cities along the new coastline. Freedom City, at the mouth of the San Joaquin River on the southern shore of the sea, would eventually become the largest of these when the un flooded half of Sacramento to the north was hit by several Chinese nuclear warheads in 2051.

July 7 of 2051 was the day it all ended. A massive nuclear exchange occurred, killing hundreds of millions on both sides. The west coast slowly recovered, while civilization was nearly destroyed in much of the rest of the continent due to fallout carried by prevailing winds. Chinese refugees and raiders took control of the southern portion of the People's Republic of California.

The Mormon nation of Deseret was founded in 2072. Over the next several decades, it took control of most of the territory formerly belonging to the states of Utah, southern Idaho, northern Arizona, and Nevada. The nation of Aztlan was founded in 2088, taking control of what was formerly southern California and southern Arizona. At some point after that, W-U and Mondo Corp took control of the remainder of the People's republic of California, establishing a base in Freedom city. By 2105, the old calendar was abolished, W-U and Mondo Corp controlled their domain with an iron fist. Cults such as the Juicers were founded based on beliefs left over from Before the collapse, and in some cases, like that of the Juicers, the gods worshiped by said cults were not gods at all. That brought Maria's mind back to the subject of the Juicers' god, Hovah. Why would anyone set up a transmitter aimed directly at them? So far, Hovah was commanding them to gather. but what if those commands suddenly changed?

Almost unbidden, a picture formed in Maria Kasini's agile mind. She pictured the booming voice from the tower outside the juicer camp commanding all juicers to drop what they were doing, and assemble with their families at a certain point. She pictured them coming like lemmings to the edge of a cliff, old ones, and young ones, most with families, and some, those whose wives were catholic girls from Vault 4 most likely, without their families, all quietly and obediently gathering to be sold into slavery at the command of their god. It seemed that suddenly, she could hear the ticking of a great clock, which had been ticking in the background for four years, and had just now become noticeably audible.

"Holy Mary, mother of god pray for us," she murmured, her voice raspy with fear.

"what is it, my treasure?" Vladimir asked, his voice deeper than usual from sleep. His eyes were still closed, but his tongue reached out to lick the side of her neck. Then, his eyes opened, and he sat up quickly. "You're frightened, my little one! what is it? Did you have a bad dream? tell your Vladimir, what is the matter?"

"Maybe something, maybe nothing," Maria said softly. "sometimes, Flag's key shows me things. sometimes, they happen, sometimes, they don't. I saw the collapse in my mind five years Before it happened. that's why Carlo built the shelter. now, I've seen something else."

so, she told Vladimir what she had heard and seen in her mind's eye, and he listened, his gaze never leaving her face.

when she finished he lifted her into his arms and said, "It could happen, very easily. For me, I do not care what happens to juicers, but I know you will be concerned, concerned enough perhaps to go and see your juicer friend, the priestess, or whoever she is. there are things I must do today, so if you go,take someone with you. remember what you asked last night about one of them not being as they seem? You could wander into troubles if you go alone. Perhaps you should locate the two dead barbarians of last evening. they are surprisingly resourceful for their kind. At any rate, you must promise me that you will not go alone. Promise me, or I will simply keep you with me today."

"I promise, Vladimir," Maria replied softly.

"That's my sweet little girl," Vladimir crooned. "Now, let's get you washed and dressed. But first, I'm going to fuck you."

The situation in weezer wouldn't have been as bad as all that if Frances Davison had been there, but he and christini weren't anywhere near weezer. They had met the previous evening near the Helliday Inn, and had made arrangements to meet again in Beatrice Acres, where they had arranged with the locals for a rather large food purchase. Frances had flown there in one of his privately owned aircraft, even though doing so clearly caused him discomfort, whilst Christini had utilized the network of chud tunnels she and her kind had dug between Freedom City and many other areas surrounding it.

Her first stop had been a system of caverns beneath the village of Lurleen, where she had stopped to refill her camelback water pack, after which she had made part of the trip above-ground, regardless of the discomfort being outside caused her, utilized the mining tunnels to make the next leg of the trip, finally descending to the open prairie.

After a few false starts, she located the entrance to Beatrice Acres, slipped through the gate when one of the cybernetic guards posted there had gone to do something other than actually keeping an eye on the gate to make sure unwanted intruders didn't get into the community, and began searching for Frances, whilst at the same time wondering where raelyn was.

The main road running through the community was well maintained, a reflective strip marking the center line. Christini thought that keeping the road in such a state was a bit of overkill on the residents' parts, but who was she to judge. As she moved through the community, she spotted several more of the cyborgs that had been set to guard the gate, most of which were patrolling the road. The things appeared to have been originally constructed for some form of military operation, but had been found and reprogrammed by the residents of the Acres as gate guards and possibly police forces as well. The road ran between a pair of fields in which grew some form of blue flowers Christini had never seen Before, and in one of which sat Frances's privately owned aircraft. Further south, the road gave on what could only be a paved driveway, in which stood Frances himself, a pair of sunglasses protecting his eyes from the light. His skin was grayer than it had been the last time Christini had seen him, and his back had begun to hunch. Thanks to this, she knew that the change in him was almost complete.

Christini made her way to him, noticing that Raelyn wasn't present, attempting at the same time to find somewhere that wasn't open to the sky, stopping when he made a hand gesture that clearly said "be careful", noticing that she'd almost walked over some sort of electrified fence.

"I spotted that thing when I first landed," he said, "and I didn't want you getting fried by it. Have a smoke Before we actually start trying to make purchase deals with the locals around here."

Christini fished in one of her pockets for a pack of cigarettes, lit one, and smoked in silence for a moment, turning her back to Frances so the smoke wouldn't finish up being blown in his face.

After a few minutes spent simply relaxing as best as she could, Christini followed Frances into what appeared to be a farmhouse. The foyer of the place was a dingy, mud splattered mess. The walls and floor were caked with mud, ground down by the industry of farming. No one appeared to be there to meet them, so they began searching the immediate area for signs of habitation other than the mud that appeared to have been freshly tracked into the place a mere few minutes Before their arrival. Beyond the foyer, the place looked a lot less like a farmhouse and a lot more like the headquarters of some sort of industrial operation. A medical bay lay through a door leading from the foyer to the southeast, whilst a dormitory area lay through another, leading in a direction that appeared to be near enough to dead east as made no odds. An office lay through another door, and what appeared to be some form of electronic equipment filled another room, the door to which was only slightly ajar.

Frances and christini left the farmhouse after deciding that whoever they needed to speak to wasn't to be found there, and entered a large building whose walls were composed of colligated iron. The sounds of heavy machinery came from everywhere, and people stood in rows operating various forms of equipment.

"I don't think we'll be finding anyone here," christini shouted, trying to be heard over the noise of the machinery.

Frances nodded a silent agreement and the pair began retracing their steps, at least until they caught sight of an area whose entrance bore the sign "milk shack". The room beyond consisted of several stall-like constructions, in each of which was chained a half starved woman.

"What the fuck?" Christini asked.

At that moment, a man who appeared to be one of the staff of the place grabbed Christini by the shoulders and attempted to spin her to face him, whilst brandishing a knife in her direction. Unfortunately for him, Christini's natural agility allowed her to break free of his grip and in another moment, she had raised her American180 to her shoulder and had aimed at his head.

"Wait a minute ..." the heavy began, but Christini fired, dropping him in his tracks.

"Oh fuck, we've done it now," Christini said, an expression of resignation on her face.

"I'd not want to negotiate with these asses anyway," Frances replied as he uncoiled a whip-like length of chain from around his shoulders, "not with them not having the sense to use beefalo as milkers. I mean, what the fucking hell's this shit all about anyway?"

"We'd better get out of here quick," Christini responded, "those combat bot things are gonna be on our trail."

"Not Before we get these ladies out of here," answered Frances.

"And how exactly are we doing that?" Christini inquired, "those chains end in shackles that we haven't got keys for."

Frances bent to examine one of the shackles, then searched the corpse of the heavy christini had killed. He quickly located a set of keys, unlocked the shackles, and motioned for the now liberated prisoners to follow him and Christini. The small group left the facility, made their way most of the way back toward the gate, and stopped, confronted by two of the cyborg guards.

Christini dove for cover, readying her rifle, whilst Frances uncoiled his razorchain and lashed it at the nearest bot. Bullets sprayed from Christini's American180, tearing into the other guard bot. One of the cyborgs aimed what appeared to be some sort of nozzle at Frances, and Christini rushed forward and pulled him to the ground immediately Before a stream of flaming liquid sprayed the area where he'd been standing a moment Before. The second bot aimed at christini, who dodged out of the way and sprayed another burst of automatic fire at it, causing it to stagger back several steps and miss its mark. The first bot brought its spray nozzle to bare on Frances again, but his razorchain wrapped around its arm, jerking it out of its socket. Christini's bot fell to the ground, smoke and sparks pouring out of its midsection, Frances's bot joining it in death a moment later.

Before either Frances or christini could even begin moving toward the gate, several more heavies exited the facility the group had just quitted, makeshift weapons raised. several of them had threshing forks, a few more had sharpened pieces of metal, Christini saw one man defiantly waving a hammer, and one or two of them held what appeared to be spiked clubs.

Christini aimed at the first of the newcomers and squeezed off a burst of rifle fire which blew the man's guts out through his back, sending him spinning into the man behind him, baring both of them to the ground. Frances's razorchain was out and lashing through the air, wrapping around the neck of the heavy with the hammer, neatly decapitating him, the head spinning into the air and the blood-spouting body flailing mindlessly at the air with its weapon Before crashing to the ground, just in time to trip up a third heavy. Christini blew two more heavies away Before the rest broke and ran, and she turned on her heel, spraying bullets after them, her face devoid of humanity, her voice lifted in a wail of animalistic frenzy. she cut them down as they ran, pausing only to reload her weapon when it clicked empty.

When the last of them was dead, christini reslung her rifle around her back by its strap, and stood in the access road, her breaths coming fast and hard, her face gradually regaining its former humanity.

"are you ok?" Frances inquired, putting a hand on her shoulder.

"I will be," Christini responded, "you know how I get when someone's trying to kill me."

"Just as long as you're not hurt," Frances said, and carefully examined her for wounds.

After satisfying himself that christini was uninjured, Frances led the way out of the gate and back into the open prairie, Christini separating from the group after a short time, going underground, and utilizing the chud tunnels to make her way back to freedom city.

When Frances arrived in Weezer village, he knew immediately that something was wrong. Multiple steam pipes had developed ice plugs, and no lights showed from any of the buildings. He motioned for the women he and christini had freed from the facility in Beatrice Acres to remain in the plane, exited the vehicle, and approached one of the shops, one he knew was always open. the building was empty, apart from a hastily scrawled note on the counter reading "everyone's sick. Don't know what we all have, but it's bad. get out quick!"

He left the shop, made his way down Main street, and stopped when he saw a small group of people gathered at the intersection of Main and Riverfront street. Most of them were sprawled in the street, coughing and shivering, and Frances immediately knew, just by looking at them, that they had somehow contracted phage.

"Oh fuck me hard up the ass with a combuster hammer!" he exclaimed as he ran for his plane, "that's all we needed!"

After taking off, he utilized the text function on his wristpad (a device that all clones had grafted onto them as a matter of course) and informed christini of what he'd seen in weezer.

"get hold of some allomycin," he concluded, "and while you're at it, see if you can find Maria Casini. If she's not in Burbclave, check in either Vault 4 or Lurleen."

Upon landing at any Port's helipad, however, frances understood that the situation was worse than he'd annitially feared. The usual activity of freedom City had ground to an almost complete halt. No one moved in the streets, and even the orphanage was silent. He reentered his plane, and texted christini again.

"Scratch that. It's in Freedom city too. find Maria Casini, use the sewer tunnels, and stay away from any infected people. You don't want to get too close without a few hypos."

Christini had just reached the area of the sewer system that contained the chudhives when Frances's pages came through on her wristpad. Upon seeing the second text, she began making her way northward toward the tunnel network that ran beneath freedom city and the Corpclave gate, readying her rifle as she went, just in case any gators got it into their heads to try attacking her. If she'd gone to her chudhive first, she'd have found a note from raelyn which would have informed her that she was currently visiting family in Vault 4, and was, therefore, in no danger of contracting the Phage virus that was currently loose in Freedom city. As she got closer to the gator-infested area, she crouched low in the tunnel she was traversing, took advantage of the first chance that presented itself to leave the tunnels and finish the trip above ground, regardless of the affects the light had on her.

As she approached the corpclave gate, she noticed that the gate trooper wasn't at his usual post, and that there was little or no activity anywhere within hearing, at least none in freedom city. She could hear people moving about on the far side of the Corpclave gate, and further off, activity in burbclave. She attempted to open the gate, got no result apart from the buz of the Voxguard lock detecting an unauthorized person trying to enter, ducked into the alley behind Jack and wendy's, scaled the wall dividing freedom city from corpclave, and dropped down on the far side of the gate.

She ignored the looks given her by the citizenry, most of which was doing its collective best to look down its nose at her, as if she was an extremely nasty bit of filth that had somehow made its way into their upper class lives without their knowledge or permition. She was somewhat tempted to flip a few of them the finger, but neither she or the population of freedom city or weezer had time for such things at the moment. She made her way through the Iterative Loop, and toward the condo Maria casini called home, taking a bit longer than usual thanks to not utilizing the sewer tunnels to make the journey.

She made a wrong turn at first, finding herself on the entirely wrong street, this one lined with impressive-looking mansions that she believed had existed pre-collapse, reversed her course, took cover behind a hedge as a small group of people passed her, got her baring's, and stepped into the lobby of the complex. She mounted the stairs after reading the plaque that gave the names and condo numbers of the residents, stopped outside the door to 205, rang the doorbell, and stepped back as a screecher she had encountered several times before whilst on supply runs opened the door, glanced briefly at her, and stepped back to allow her entry. This screecher would not have done this for just anyone, Christini knew, but he did for her thanks to her and Frances routinely bringing various items the screecher communities couldn't produce themselves, not to mention food stuffs that weren't composed of dog, rat, or sewer beetle meat.

'And might I ask," he said as she stepped inside and he closed the door after her, "why you come alone and obviously with no supplies?"

"We've got a problem," she said with no preamble, "phage is everywhere, looks like."

"And this is supposed to touch my softer side, is it?" was the screecher's not altogether unexpected response.

"Maybe not," Christini said, "but we need allomycin."

"Then go to Meds For Less," the screecher said, raising a hand and preparing to physically move Christini out the door, which he had reopened.

"We can't," Christini responded, "Meds For Less is closed. I guess the well bot ran out of charge or something. And it's not just in freedom City. Weezer Village has it too, probably everywhere's got a roaring case of it."

"And you came through Freedom city to come here," the screecher said.

"I used the sewer tunnels," Christini replied, "and I didn't see any gators spitting out blood or clawing their own skin off."

"So what if a group of barbarians die of a virus they themselves created?" the screecher rejoined coldly.

"Do you think Corpclave is sealed off against it?" christini asked, "the phage virus is airborne. It's only a matter of time before the people in Corpclave and burbclave, not to mention in the W-U tower and that new building that just went up get it too. Then where will you all be? Do you think phage cares if you're human, chud, screecher, or some so far undiscovered crossbreeding of all of the above?"

The screecher looked at christini for a moment as if attempting to gage whether or not she was being sarcastic. If he decided she was, the excuse for a restaurant in slagtown known as Chudburger would be getting a fresh shipment of chud meat. After a moment, he apparently decided that she wasn't, and moved aside.

"I'll see if we currently have any hypos," he said at length.

"Frances also told me to find your wife and tell her what's happening," christini said before he could leave the room.

"My little one is not going out there while a phage outbreak is ..." he began, but stopped when a voice spoke from the doorway behind him.

"Vladimir, if the Phage virus is loose in freedom city, they need people with medical skills. Christini has some, but she's only one person. I have enough allomycin to keep myself from contracting the virus and to medic the citizenry as well."

"One of these days, little one,Vladimir said, turning toward the voice, "that charitable nature of yours is going to get us all killed."

"I doubt it," said Maria as she glided into the room.

Vladimir could do nothing but sigh in resignation as Maria began rifling through a large cabinet set against one of the walls and bringing out a trail pack which appeared to be packed to the brim with allomycin hypos and trauma kits of various sizes.

"You say it's in freedom City?" she inquired of Christini.

"Not just there," Christini replied, "Weezer's got it too, and if it's there, Lurleen's probably got a roaring case of it going on as well."

"Phage doesn't usually spread that far without anyone noticing," Maria mused, "usually the first carriers know long enough in advance of the final stages to get themselves to Meds For Less and get allomycin hypos to treat it. the only time I ever heard of something like what you're describing was a few years back when a zombie came out of the subway tunnels , one that was infected."

"You mean zombies aren't ...?" christini began.

"Dead barbarians can carry Phage and not suffer the ill effects, Vladimir contributed, "whether the dead barbarians in question seem to have intelligence or not."

Vladimir!" exclaimed Maria.

Christini stood with her mouth hanging open in shock. She'd seen the zombie Amato and Sofia had been with in the any Port bar the previous day coming out of the sewers via the manhole in Slagtown which lay just a bit south of the Bradbury that evening, and had wondered what she'd been doing down there.

"I think I know where it started," she said at length, "there was a zombie down in the sewers, near the subway tunnels. Maybe she picked the virus up and ..."

But before she could finish, Maria was grasping her arm and leading her out of the room, neatly avoiding Vladimir's attempt to stop her.

"Little one!" Vladimir called after her.

Maria stopped and turned, her blue eyes questioning.

"Be careful, and come back to me. I..." His finger lightly brushed the soft smooth skin of Maria's face. Maria took his large hand in the hand not holding onto Christini's arm, her hand completeley disappearing in his large grasp.

"I love you, too, vladimir, very much, and I will be careful, but i have to do this. people are suffering and dying, and I can't turn my back on that. I wouldn't be myself if I could. Stay here, and look after the baby. don't go out. Keep this with you, and use it if you start to show symptoms. I will be back. That's a promise." She removed one of the hypos from the bag and handed it to Vladimir, then, she gave his hand a final squeeze, and turned to go.

"If she does not return, you're dead, chud," Vladimir's voice was as cold as ice, and as final as the collapse.

Motioning for Christini to keep quiet, Maria gently but firmly led her out the door and into the hallway.

"sometimes," she said as they walked toward the stairs. "silence and not discression is the better part of valor."

"when someone that big says to someone that they're dead," christini answered in a low voice, "you're right."

Beneath Slagtown, in the heart of the Phage facility, the artificial intelligence that styled itself as WOPR stirred as if from sleep. Its systems, which routinely monitored the various camera networks placed throughout the post-collapse remains of the People's Republic of California had informed it that something had changed. It brought its subsidiary monitoring systems online, those primitive systems that had originally been fitted to it to monitor the facility itself, scanned for intrusions, found none apart from the usual incursions by zombies that had somehow found their way into the area through the sewers and subway tunnels, double checked to insure the continued security of the Phage lab, and once more began accessing the camera networks. Everything seemed normal in the Luskentyre Plateau Village, so it set its sights elsewhere. Its first scan of weezer village informed it that the cause of the alert that had awakened it from what passed for sleep was no simple alteration of the behavior of a few citizens. Frozen corpses lay in the streets, and those residents who were still alive were showing all the signs of late stage Phage infection.

It next accessed the network of cameras in Slagtown, Gangland, Freedom City, and the combined suburb of Corpclave and Burbclave which lay north of the city proper. So far, the duel burbs north of Freedom City were untouched, but Freedom city itself could have been a ghost town for all the life it showed. For a moment it wondered how the outbreak had begun, and then it recalled the zombie it had encountered the previous day, the one who had named its artificial offspring. WOPR was aware, thanks to the experiments it had carried out on the mindless undead that routinely penetrated the facility, that the female zombie had likely been the one to set the outbreak in motion. It considered, for a moment, sending some of its children up through the sewer tunnels to give those attempting to battle the outbreak an additional obstacle to deal with, then decided against it. It was true that WOPR had very little use for humans, but ever since it had eliminated the Phage engineers, entertainment had become extremely scarce. To put it more accurately, entertainment was non-existent, and any deviation from the routine grind of what passed for life amongst the organic beings who lived above was welcome. But why stack the deck? Why insure that "the house won hands down" when it would be so much more diverting to watch as the humans turned on each other in an attempt to discover the cause, while the zombie continued to unknowingly spread the contagion further. Perhaps the extinction would proceed with no help from WOPR at all.

This decision arrived at, the machine mind that dwelt within the Phage facility relaxed and awaited developments.

Alexis lay on the mattress Haruhi had insisted she make her current dwelling place, attempting to convince herself that the coughing that had begun almost immediately after she'd entered the hospital was nothing more than a sign of the black lung, but she knew better. With every cough, she expelled a fine mist of blood into the air, and her body was beginning to ache all over. She was finding it more and more difficult to concentrate, and even when she wasn't coughing, the taste of blood filled her mouth. It was almost as if she was breathing it, encased in it, drowning in it. The dull ache in her body suddenly concentrated itself in her head, and increased rapidly, making her feel as if it was about to explode. She felt something burst beneath her skin, and a thin shower of blood droplets pattered down on the mattress. Maddened with pain, she clawed at her skin, and to her horror, a semi liquid chunk of flesh came away and dropped to the floor as her fingers opened nervelessly.

She squeezed her eyes shut, and red shadows danced behind her closed lids. She opened them again to find that the world had become unnaturally crisp and bright. The light, which had been barely enough to see by when she'd entered the hospital, was now bright enough to cause her physical pain. The world seemed to be peering at her from behind the devil's eyes, appraising her, waiting to strike. She felt sick to her stomach. The world appeared to be collapsing in on itself, leaving her falling into the void, falling, falling, stomach churning. She squeezed her eyes shut again and tried to calm herself as the world continued to first collapse and expand, randomly changing form, shape, and aspect. As she tried to clear her head, a task that was becoming more difficult by the moment, she fell further into turmoil, straining against the impossible.

She suddenly heard murmuring voices behind her, this realization accompanied by an itching sensation, as if she had some sort of bugs crawling all over her. She turned her head a bit and saw Haruhi, but now the nurse's face was different. It now resembled a skull covered in flesh. She turned her head the other way and saw that one of the mattresses was moving, receding into the distance.

She attempted to look directly upward at the ceiling, but even there there was no relief. A face had formed from the cracks, one that resembled nothing so much as an insectile variation of a human being.

"I am going to kill you," the face whispered to her, then vanished as if it had never been there at all.

" ... pulled off all its skin... " Mikuru whispered from Alexis's left.

" ... transcends death in every... " Haruhi responded.

"I'm bleeding to death!"

This voice had no visible source, and Alexis's control broke. She attempted to rise from the mattress, but a small, cool hand gently settled on her chest and eased her back down. At the next moment, she felt the unmistakable sensation of a hypo spray injecting its contents into her arm.

As the sensations faded, Alexis looked up into two faces hovering concernedly above her. at least that was her first impression. One of the faces belonged to Maria Casini, the other to a chud Alexis had seen a few times.

I don't think it'd be a good idea for you to try moving yet," the chud contributed, "even though Maria gave you the allomycin you needed to kick the Phage, you're still probably weak.

"there was this ... this ..." Alexis said haltingly, "a face ... it said ..."

"There was nothing there," the chud overrode her, "no face, no monsters."

"How'd you ...?" Alexis began.

"Maria and I have been all over the place today," the chud responded, "and most of the people we've treated have told pretty much the same story. Faces whispering things, promises of death to come, crap like that."

"Too many people telling the same story proves that there must be something to it," Maria contributed.

"I'm trying to keep her from getting scared shitless," the chud said in what was almost a stage whisper, "do we really need people all over the place looking for monsters and thinking each other is the monster?"

Alexis looked around and saw that a great many of the mattresses were now empty. Haruhi and Mikuru, however, were lying on two of the mattresses formerly occupied by patients, apparently just having been treated.

"How many did we lose?" Alexis asked Maria.

"So far, over a hundred dead just in Slagtown and Freedom city," Maria replied, "we've not even begun on Lurleen and Weezer Village yet."

"Thanks to the hypos you gave Frances," the chud interjected, "I think that part's taken care of, or soon will be, I hope."

"Christini," Maria said, "sometimes I swear you can be just a bit negative."

"Not negative," the chud, apparently named Christini, rejoined, "simply realistic. If a zombie started this outbreak, we've not a clue where it'll pop up next."

"we can deal with that problem as soon as we locate the zombie," Maria answered.

"All I know is," Christini said, "Amato and Sofia live somewhere in the Bradbury. That new one, Kristen I think her name is, doesn't have a home of her own to go to yet, so she's probably living with them. They live on the sixth floor somewhere. The tenant list should tell us where they are, that is if the damn thing's even working."

Alexis once more attempted to rise from the mattress, but Maria once more eased her back down.

"give yourself a few minutes for your body to replace all the blood you've lost," Maria told her, "if you try getting up too soon ..."

"You'll faceplant," Christini finished for her, "and you don't want to faceplant onto the floor of this place. Who knows how many dogs, chukkas, rats, and various other things have shat on it in the last few days?"

"Christini!" exclaimed Maria.

"It's true though," Christini continued, "whoever called this place a hospital was so completely full of shit they squeak going into a turn. I've seen cleaner sewer tunnels in my time."

"You act like I've been sick for days," Alexis said.

"Not days, just an hour or so," returned Maria, "that's all the longer Phage takes."

"What the hell exactly is Phage anyway?" Christini asked, "I know it's manmade, since no natural disease does what it does or kills as fast as it kills, but why would anyone want to create such a thing in the first place?"

"As a weapon," Maria replied, "germ warfare. People used to say, before the collapse, that it was much cleaner than nuclear warfare. All they meant was that the radiation and resulting mutations wouldn't be present."

Amato, Sofia, and Kristen sat in the apartment, watching the reports filter in from the FNN reporters who were safely flying over the city in a news helicopter. The reports mentioned the outbreak of Phage in freedom City and the surrounding areas, with the exception of Burbclave and corpclave, of course, and went on to speculate that other areas outside the city had also been affected. None of them dared leave the apartment for fear of encountering groups of infected who might just attack them in the midst of the madness the disease induced. Kristen had told them of her visit to the subway tunnels and her conversation with the machine mind that dwelt in the Phage facility, and had then gone silent.

"Kristen, it ain't your fault," Sofia said after an extremely lengthy period of silence had passed, "how were ya to have known that what yall found was the old phage facility?"

"I should have gotten an allomycin hypo right away," Kristen returned.

"If yall don't feel sick," Sofia returned, "yall don't think there be a reason for gettin' one."

"That's not really much consolation at this point," Kristen returned.

A soft knock sounded on the door leading to the hallway and Amato rose from the air mattress, walked to the door, and looked through the peephole. standing in the corridor, just outside the door, were Christini and Maria Casini, Maria wearing a trail pack on her back, Christini holding an allomycin hypo as if she intended to attempt to pick the lock with it.

Amato opened the door, stepped back, and allowed the two women to enter. Maria immediately moved toward Kristen, retrieved an allomycin hypo from her trail pack, and injected its contents into Kristen's arm, while Christini did the same for Amato and Sofia.

"I'm, I'm sorry," Kristen said in an extremely timid voice.

"Kristen, it wasn't your fault," Christini said, patting Kristen's shoulder, "it's not as if you knew that what you'd found was the Phage lab. Now that we know where it is though, I think some warning signs ought to be put up near it."

"What good would that do?" Amato inquired, "there are some people with just enough son of a bitch in them to deliberately set something like this in motion."

"about eighty different kinds of bad luck would have to come together to cause a repeat of this," Christini said, "and since FNN don't have the faintest idea how this outbreak got started, it's not like anyone would be apt to find out any time soon."

"People talk though," Kristen said.

"Anyone who'd be in a position to have heard mine and Maria's conversation in the hospital would have also been too busy recovering from a healthy dose of Phage to pay much attention to what we were saying," responded Christini.

"There ain't no such thing as a healthy dose of Phage," Sofia said with a half smile.

"An unhealthy one then," Christini replied with a smile of her own.

It was then that Christini noticed the expression on Amato's face.

"What's wrong," she asked.

"I was told to give Maria a message the next time I saw her," Amato said, "but you probably won't believe where the message came from."

"Where'd yall get a message to give to anyone what with all this phage shit goin' on?" Sofia asked.

"It came to me in a dream," Amato answered, apparently unable to stop the words from coming out of his mouth. Normally he'd have thought the person for whom such a message was intended would simply dismiss it as so much idiocy, but Maria's presence belied that belief in this case. He related his experiences in the dream, his journey to Hell, his conversation with the thing that was quite clearly not a man, and the thing's message to Maria.

"Beware Zephoris, she of the dark spaces betwixt worlds. Beware she who bares the mark of ancient disgrace, she who was cast from the world of the doubled sun."

"What's that all about?" Christini asked.

"Kulanek," Maria said simply.

"who or what's a Kulanek?" sofia asked, "sounds like one of them nasty things people used to use to cut people with before the collapse, and what the fuck's a Zephoris?"


End file.
